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THE MIRROR 

OF 

THE SEA 



I 



BY 



Joseph Conrad 

Author of "Nostromo" etc. 




1 



NEW YORK AND LONDON 
HARPER &- BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

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4 1908 
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Copyright, 1906, by Harper & Brothers. 



^-/// rights reserved. 
Published October, 1906. 



Contents 

PAGE 

Landfalls and Departures i 

Emblems of Hope 18 

The Fine Art 35 

Cobwebs and Gossamer 56 

The Weight of the Burden 74 

Overdue and Missing 93 

The Grip of the Land 109 

The Character of the Foe 117 

Rulers of East and West 132 

The Faithful River 168 

In Captivity 193 

Initiation 216 

The Nursery of the Craft 250 

The "Tremolino" 262 

The Heroic Age . . 310 



Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2011 with funding from 
The Library of Congress 



http://www.archive.org/details/mirrorofseaOOconr 



The Mirror of the Sea 




Landfalls and Departures 



I ANDFALL and Departure mark 
the rhythmical swing of a sea- 
man's life and of a ship's ca- 
reer. From land to land is 
the most concise definition of 
a ship's earthly fate. 

A ' ' Departure ' ' is not what a vain people 
of landsmen may think. The term "Land- 
fall" is more easily understood; you fall in 
with the land, and it is a matter of a quick 
eye and of a clear atmosphere. The De- 
parture is not the ship's going away from 
her port any more than the Landfall can 
be looked upon as the synonyme of arrival. 
But there is this difference in the Departure : 
that the term does not imply so much a sea 
event as a definite act entailing a process — 
the precise observation of certain landmarks 
by means of the compass-card. 

i 



The Mirror of the Sea 

Your Landfall, be it a peculiarly shaped 
mountain, a rocky headland, or a stretch of 
sand-dunes, you meet at first with a single 
glance. Further recognition will follow in 
due course; but essentially a Landfall, good 
or bad, is made and done with at the first cry 
of "Land ho!" The Departure is distinctly 
a ceremony of navigation. A ship may have 
left her port some time before ; she may have 
been at sea, in the fullest sense of the phrase, 
for days; but, for all that, as long as the 
coast she was about to leave remained in 
sight, a southern-going ship of yesterday 
had not in the sailor's sense begun the en- 
terprise of a passage. 

The taking of Departure, if not the last 
sight of the land, is perhaps the last pro- 
fessional recognition of the land on the part 
of a sailor. It is the technical, as distin- 
guished from the sentimental, "good-bye." 
Henceforth he has done with the coast astern 
of his ship. It is a matter personal to the 
man. It is not the ship that takes her de- 
parture ; the seaman takes his Departure by 
means of cross-bearings which fix the place 
of the first tiny pencil-cross on the white ex- 



Landfalls and Departures 

panse of the track -chart, where the ship's 
position at noon shall be marked by just such 
another tiny pencil -cross for every day of 
her passage. And there may be sixty, 
eighty, any number of these crosses on the 
ship's track from land to land. The great- 
est number in my experience was a hundred 
and thirty of such crosses from the pilot 
station at the Sand Heads in the Bay of 
Bengal to the Scilly's light. A bad pas- 
sage. . . . 

A Departure, the last professional sight of 
land, is always good, or at least good enough. 
For, even if the weather be thick, it does 
not matter much to a ship having all the sea 
open before her bows. A Landfall may be 
good or bad. You encompass the earth 
with one particular spot of it in your eye. 
In all the devious tracings the course of a 
sailing-ship leaves upon the white paper of a 
chart she is always aiming for that one little 
spot — maybe a small island in the ocean, a 
single headland upon the long coast of a 
continent, a light-house on a bluff, or simply 
the peaked form of a mountain like an ant- 
heap afloat upon the waters. But if you 

3 



The Mirror of the Sea 

have sighted it on the expected bearing, 
then that Landfall is good. Fogs, snow- 
storms, gales thick with clouds and rain — 
those are the enemies of good Landfalls. 



Some commanders of ships take their De- 
parture from the home coast sadly, in a 
spirit of grief and discontent. They have 
a wife, children perhaps, some affection at 
any rate, or perhaps only some pet vice, 
that must be left behind for a year or more. 
I remember only one man who walked his 
deck with a springy step and gave the first 
course of the passage in an elated voice. 
But he, as I learned afterwards, was leaving 
nothing behind him, except a welter of debts 
and threats of legal proceedings. 

On the other hand, I have known many 
captains who, directly their ship had left the 
narrow waters of the Channel, would dis- 
appear from the sight of their ship's com- 
pany altogether for some three days or more. 
They would take a long dive, as it were, into 
their state-room, only to emerge a few days 

4 



Landfalls and Departures 

afterwards with a more or less serene brow. 
Those were the men easy to get on with. 
Besides, such a complete retirement seemed 
to imply a satisfactory amount of trust in 
their officers, and to be trusted displeases no 
seaman worthy of the name. 

On my first voyage as chief mate with 

good Captain MacW , I remember that I 

felt quite flattered, and went blithely about 
my duties, myself a commander for all prac- 
tical purposes. Still, whatever the great- 
ness of my illusion, the fact remained that 
the real commander was there, backing up 
my self-confidence, though invisible to my 
eyes behind a maple-wood veneered cabin- 
door with a white china handle. 

That is the time, after your Departure is 
taken, when the spirit of your commander 
communes with you in a muffled voice, as if 
from the sanctum sanctorum of a temple; 
because, call her a temple or a "hell afloat" 
— as some ships have been called — the cap- 
tain's state-room is surely the august place 
in every vessel. 

The good MacW- would not even 

come out to his meals, and fed solitarily in 

5 



The Mirror of the Sea 

his holy of holies from a tray covered with 
a white napkin. Our steward used to bend 
an ironic glance at the perfectly empty 
plates he was bringing out from there. 
This grief for his home, which overcomes so 
many married seamen, did not deprive Cap- 
tain MacW of his legitimate appetite. 

In fact, the steward would almost invariably 
come up to me, sitting in the captain's chair 
at the head of the table, to say in a grave 
murmur, "The captain asks for one more 
slice of meat and two potatoes." We, his 
officers, could hear him moving about in his 
berth, or lightly snoring, or fetching deep 
sighs, or splashing and blowing in his bath- 
room; and we made our reports to him 
through the key-hole, as it were. It was the 
crowning achievement of his amiable char- 
acter that the answers we got were given in 
a quite mild and friendly tone. Some com- 
manders in their periods of seclusion are con- 
stantly grumpy, and seem to resent the mere 
sound of your voice as an injury and an insult. 
But a grumpy recluse cannot worry his 
subordinates : whereas the man in whom the 
sense of duty is strong (or, perhaps, only the 

6 



Landfalls and Departures 

sense of self-importance), and who persists 
in airing on deck his moroseness all day — 
and perhaps half the night — -becomes a 
grievous infliction. He walks the poop 
darting gloomy glances, as though he wished 
to poison the sea, and snaps your head off 
savagely whenever you happen to blunder 
within ear-shot. And these vagaries are the 
harder to bear patiently, as becomes a man 
and an officer, because no sailor is really 
good-tempered during the first few days of 
a voyage. There are regrets, memories, the 
instinctive longing for the departed idleness, 
the instinctive hate of all work. Besides, 
things have a knack of going wrong at the 
start, especially in the matter of irritating 
trifles. And there is the abiding thought of 
a whole year of more or less hard life before 
one, because there was hardly a southern- 
going voyage in the yesterday of the sea 
which meant anything less than a twelve- 
month. Yes ; it needed a few days after the 
taking of your departure for a ship's com- 
pany to shake down into their places, and 
for the soothing deep-water ship routine to 
establish its beneficent sway. 

7 



The Mirror of the Sea 

It is a great doctor for sore hearts and 
sore heads, too, your ship's routine, which I 
have seen soothe — at least for a time — the 
most turbulent of spirits. There is health 
in it, and peace, and satisfaction of the ac- 
complished round; for each day of the ship's 
life seems to close a circle within the wide 
ring of the sea-horizon. It borrows a cer- 
tain dignity of sameness from the majestic 
monotony of the sea. He who loves the sea 
loves also the ship's routine. 

Nowhere else than upon the sea do the 
days, weeks, and months fall away quicker 
into the past. They seem to be left astern 
as easily as the light air -bubbles in the 
swirls of the ship's wake, and vanish into a 
great silence in which your ship moves on 
with a sort of magical effect. They pass 
away, the days, the weeks, the months. 
Nothing but a gale can disturb the orderly 
life of the ship; and the spell of unshaken 
monotony that seems to have fallen upon 
the very voices of her men is broken only by 
the near prospect of a Landfall. 

Then is the spirit of the ship's commander 
stirred strongly again. But it is not moved 

8 



Landfalls and Departures 

to seek seclusion, and to remain, hidden and 
inert, shut up in a small cabin with the solace 
of a good bodily appetite. When about to 
make the land, the spirit of the ship's com- 
mander is tormented by an unconquerable 
restlessness. It seems unable to abide for 
many seconds together in the holy of holies 
of the captain's state-room; it will out on 
deck and gaze ahead, through straining 
eyes, as the appointed moment comes 
nearer. It is kept vigorously upon the 
stretch of excessive vigilance. Meantime 
the body of the ship's commander is being 
enfeebled by want of appetite ; at least, such 
is my experience, though "enfeebled" is 
perhaps not exactly the word. I might say, 
rather, that it is spiritualized by a disregard 
for food, sleep, and all the ordinary com- 
forts, such as they are, of sea-life. In one or 
two cases I have known that detachment 
from the grosser needs of existence remain 
regrettably incomplete in the matter of 
drink. 

But these two cases were, properly speak- 
ing, pathological cases, and the only two in 
all my sea experience. In one of these two 

9 



The Mirror of the Sea 

instances of a craving for stimulants, de- 
veloped from sheer anxiety, I cannot assert 
that the man's seaman -like qualities were 
impaired in the least. It was a very anx- 
ious case, too, the land being made sud- 
denly, close-to, on a wrong bearing, in thick 
weather, and during a fresh on-shore gale- 
Going below to speak to him soon after, I 
was unlucky enough to catch my captain in 
the very act of hasty cork-drawing. The 
sight, I may say, gave me an awful scare. I 
was well aware of the morbidly sensitive 
nature of the man. Fortunately, I man- 
aged to draw back unseen, and, taking care 
to stamp heavily with my sea-boots at the 
foot of the cabin stairs, I made my second 
entry. But for this unexpected glimpse, no 
act of his during the next twenty-four hours 
could have given me the slightest suspicion 
that all was not well with his nerve. 



Quite another case, and having nothing 
to do with drink, was that of poor Captain 
B . He used to suffer from sick head- 



IO 



Landfalls and Departures 

aches, in his young days, every time he was 
approaching a coast. Well over fifty years 
of age when I knew him, short, stout, dig- 
nified, perhaps a little pompous, he was a 
man of a singularly well-informed mind, the 
least sailor-like in outward aspect, but cer- 
tainly one of the best seamen whom it has 
been my good luck to serve under. He was 
a Plymouth man, I think, the son of a 
country doctor, and both his elder boys were 
studying medicine. He commanded a big 
London ship, fairly well known in her day. 
I thought no end of him, and that is why I 
remember with a peculiar satisfaction the 
last words he spoke to me on board his ship 
after an eighteen months' voyage. It was 
in the dock in Dundee, where we had 
brought a full cargo of jute from Calcutta. 
We had been paid off that morning, and I 
had come on board to take my sea-chest 
away and to say good-bye. In his slightly 
lofty but courteous way he inquired what 
were my plans. I replied that I intended 
leaving for London by the afternoon train, 
and thought of going up for examination to 
get my master's certificate. I had just 

2 II 



The Mirror of the Sea 

enough service for that. He commended me 
for not wasting my time, with such an evi- 
dent interest in my case that I was quite 
surprised; then, rising from his chair, he 
said : 

" Have you a ship in view after you have 
passed?" 

I answered that I had nothing whatever 
in view. 

He shook hands with me, and pronounced 
the memorable words : 

"If you happen to be in want of employ- 
ment, remember that as long as I have a 
ship you have a ship, too." 

In the way of compliment there is nothing 
to beat this from a ship's captain to his 
second mate at the end of a voyage, when 
the work is over and the subordinate is done 
with. And there is a pathos in that mem- 
ory, for the poor fellow never went to sea 
again after all. He was already ailing when 
we passed St. Helena ; was laid up for a time 
when we were of! the Western Islands, but 
got out of bed to make his Landfall. He 
managed to keep up on deck as far as the 
Downs, where, giving his orders in an ex- 

12 



Landfalls and Departures 

hausted voice, he anchored for a few hours 
to send a wire to his wife and take aboard a 
North Sea pilot to help him sail the ship up 
the east coast. He had not felt equal to the 
task by himself, for it is the sort of thing 
that keeps a deep-water man on his feet 
pretty well night and day. 

When we arrived in Dundee, Mrs. B 

was already there, waiting to take him 
home. We travelled up to London by the 
same train; but by the time I had managed 
to get through with my examination the 
ship had sailed on her next voyage without 
him, and, instead of joining her again, I 
went by request to see my old commander 
in his home. This is the only one of my cap- 
tains I have ever visited in that way. He 
was out of bed by then, " quite convales- 
cent," as he declared, making a few tottering 
steps to meet me at the sitting-room door. 
Evidently he was reluctant to take his final 
cross-bearings of this earth for a Departure 
on the only voyage to an unknown destina- 
tion a sailor ever undertakes. And it was 
all very nice — the large, sunny room; his 
deep easy-chair in a bow-window, with pil- 

13 



The Mirror of the Sea 

lows and a footstool; the quiet, watchful 
care of the elderly, gentle woman who had 
borne him five children, and had not, per- 
haps, lived with him more than five full 
years out of the thirty or so of their married 
life. There was also another woman there 
in a plain black dress, quite gray-haired, sit- 
ting very erect on her chair with some sew- 
ing, from which she snatched side glances in 
his direction, and uttering not a single word 
during all the time of my call. Even when, 
in due course, I carried over to her a cup of 
tea, she only nodded at me silently, with the 
faintest ghost of a smile on her tight-set lips. 
I imagine she must have been a maiden 

sister of Mrs. B come to help nurse her 

brother-in-law. His youngest boy, a late- 
comer, a great cricketer it seemed, twelve 
years old or thereabouts, chattered enthu- 
siastically of the exploits of W. G. Grace. 
And I remember his eldest son, too, a newly 
fledged doctor, who took me out to smoke in 
the garden, and, shaking his head with pro- 
fessional gravity, but with genuine concern, 
muttered: " Yes, but he doesn't get back his 
appetite. I don't like that — I don't like 

14 



Landfalls and Departures 

that at all. " The last sight of Captain B 

I had was as he nodded his head to me out 
of the bow-window when I turned round to 
close the front gate. 

It was a distinct and complete impression, 
something that I don't know whether to call 
a Landfall or a Departure. Certainly he had 
gazed at times very fixedly before him with 
the Landfall's vigilant look, this sea-captain 
seated incongruously in a deep-backed chair. 
He had not then talked to me of employ- 
ment, of ships, of being ready to take an- 
other command; but he had discoursed of 
his early days in the abundant but thin flow 
of a wilful invalid's talk. The women looked 
worried, but sat still, and I learned more of 
him in that interview than in the whole 
eighteen months we had sailed together. It 
appeared he had " served his time" in the 
copper - ore trade, the famous copper - ore 
trade of old days between Swansea and the 
Chilian coast, coal out and ore in, deep- 
loaded both ways, as if in wanton defiance 
of the great Cape Horn seas — a work, this, 
for stanch ships, and a great school of 
stanchness for West - Country seamen. A 

15 



The Mirror of the Sea 

whole fleet of copper-bottomed barks, as 
strong in rib and planking, as well found in 
gear, as ever was sent upon the seas, manned 
by hardy crews and commanded by young 
masters, was engaged in that now long-de- 
funct trade. "That was the school I was 
trained in," he said to me almost boastfully, 
lying back among his pillows with a rug over 
his legs. And it was in that trade that he 
obtained his first command at a very early 
age. It was then that he mentioned to me 
how, as a young commander, he was always 
ill for a few days before making land after 
a long passage. But this sort of sickness 
used to pass off with the first sight of a fa- 
miliar landmark. Afterwards, he added, as 
he grew older, all that nervousness wore off 
completely; and I observed his weary eyes 
gaze steadily ahead, as if there had been 
nothing between him and the straight line of 
sea and sky, where whatever a seaman is 
looking for is first bound to appear. But I 
have also seen his eyes rest fondly upon the 
faces in the room, upon the pictures on the 
wall, upon all the familiar objects of that 
home, whose abiding and clear image must 

16 



Landfalls and Departures 

have flashed often on his memory in times 
of stress and anxiety at sea. Was he look- 
ing out for a strange Landfall, or taking 
with an untroubled mind the bearings for 
his last Departure ? 

It is hard to say; for in that voyage from 
which no man returns Landfall and De- 
parture are instantaneous, merging togeth- 
er into one moment of supreme and final 
attention. Certainly I do not remember 
observing any sign of faltering in the set 
expression of his wasted face, no hint of 
the nervous anxiety of a young commander 
about to make land on an uncharted shore. 
He had had too much experience of De- 
partures and Landfalls. And had he not 
" served his time" in the famous copper-ore 
trade out of the Bristol Channel, the work 
of the stanchest ships afloat, and the school 
of stanch seamen ? 




Emblems of Hope 



HfEFORE an anchor can ever be 
raised, it must be let go; and 
this perfectly obvious truism 
brings me at once to the sub- 
" ject of the degradation of the 
sea - language in the daily press of this 
country. 

Your journalist, whether he takes charge 
of a ship or a fleet, almost invariably " casts " 
his anchor. Now, an anchor is never cast, 
and to take a liberty with technical language 
is a crime against the clearness, precision, 
and beauty of perfected speech. 

An anchor is a forged piece of iron, ad- 
mirably adapted to its end, and technical 
language is an instrument wrought into per- 
fection by ages of experience, a flawless 
thing for its purpose. An anchor of yester- 
day (because nowadays there are contriv- 

iS 



Emblems of Hope 

ances like mushrooms and things like claws, 
of no particular expression or shape — just 
hooks) — an anchor of yesterday is in its way 
a most efficient instrument. To its perfec- 
tion its size bears witness, for there is no 
other appliance so small for the great work 
it has to do. Look at the anchors hanging 
from the cat-heads of a big ship! How tiny 
they are in proportion to the great size of 
the hull! Were they made of gold they 
would look like trinkets, like ornamental 
toys, no bigger in proportion than a jewelled 
drop in a woman's ear. And yet upon them 
will depend, more than once, the very life of 
the ship. 

An anchor is forged and fashioned for 
faithfulness; give it ground that it can bite, 
and it will hold till the cable parts, and then, 
whatever may afterwards befall its ship, 
that anchor is "lost." The honest, rough 
piece of iron, so simple in appearance, has 
more parts than the human body has limbs: 
the ring, the stock, the crown, the flukes, 
the palms, the shank. All this, according 
to the journalist, is "cast" when a ship ar- 
riving at an anchorage is brought up. 

19 



The Mirror of the Sea 

This insistence in using the odious word 
arises from the fact that a particularly be- 
nighted landsman must imagine the act of 
anchoring as a process of throwing some- 
thing overboard, whereas the anchor ready 
for its work is already overboard, and is not 
thrown over, but simply allowed to fall. It 
hangs from the ship's side at the end of a 
heavy, projecting timber called the cat-head, 
in the bight of a short, thick chain whose 
end link is suddenly released by a blow from 
a top-mall or the pull of a lever when the 
order is given. And the order is not " Heave 
over!" as the paragraphist seems to imagine, 
but "Let go!" 

As a matter of fact, nothing is ever cast 
in that sense on board ship but the lead, of 
which a cast is taken to search the depth of 
water on which she floats. A lashed boat, 
a spare spar, a cask or what not secured 
about the decks, is "cast adrift" when it is 
untied. Also the ship herself is "cast to 
port or starboard" when getting under way. 
She, however, never "casts" her anchor. 

To speak with severe technicality, a ship 
or a fleet is "brought up" — the comple- 

20 



Emblems of Hope 

mentary words unpronounced and unwrit- 
ten being, of course, "to an anchor." Less 
technically, but not less correctly, the word 
"anchored," with its characteristic appear- 
ance and resolute sound, ought to be good 
enough for the newspapers of the greatest 
maritime country in the world. "The fleet 
anchored at Spithead": can any one want a 
better sentence for brevity and seaman-like 
ring? But the "cast-anchor" trick, with its 
affectation of being a sea-phrase — for why 
not write just as well "threw anchor," 
"flung anchor," or "shied anchor"? — is 
intolerably odious to a sailor's ear. I re- 
member a coasting pilot of my early ac- 
quaintance (he used to read the papers 
assiduously) who, to define the utmost de- 
gree of lubberliness in a landsman, used 
to say, "He's one of them poor, miserable, 
' cast-anchor ' devils, ' ' 



From first to last the seaman's thoughts 
are very much concerned with his anchors. 
It is not so much that the anchor is a symbol 

21 



The Mirror of the Sea 

of hope as that it is the heaviest object that 
he has to handle on board his ship at sea in 
the usual routine of his duties. The begin- 
ning and the end of every passage are 
marked distinctly by work about the ship's 
anchors. A vessel in the Channel has her 
anchors always ready, her cables shackled 
on, and the land almost always in sight. 
The anchor and the land are indissolubly 
connected in a sailor's thoughts. But direct- 
ly she is clear of the narrow seas, heading 
out into the world, with nothing solid to 
speak of between her and the south pole, 
the anchors are got in and the cables dis- 
appear from the deck. But the anchors do 
not disappear. Technically speaking, they 
are " secured in-board"; and, on the fore- 
castle head, lashed down to ring-bolts with 
ropes and chains, under the straining sheets 
of the head-sails, they look very idle and as 
if asleep. Thus bound, but carefully looked 
after, inert and powerful, those emblems of 
hope make company for the look-out man 
in the night watches; and so the days glide 
by, with a long rest for those characteristi- 
cally shaped pieces of iron, reposing forward, 

22 



Emblems of Hope 

visible from almost every part of the ship's 
deck, waiting for their work on the other 
side of the world somewhere, while the ship 
carries them on with a great rush and splut- 
ter of foam, underneath, and the sprays of 
the open sea rust their heavy limbs. 

The first approach to the land, as yet in- 
visible to the crew's eyes, is announced by 
the brisk order of the chief mate to the 
boatswain: "We will get the anchors over 
this afternoon" or " first thing to-morrow 
morning," as the case may be. For the 
chief mate is the keeper of the ship's anchors 
and the guardian of her cable. There are 
good ships and bad ships, comfortable ships 
and ships where, from first day to last of the 
voyage, there is no rest for a chief mate's 
body and soul. And ships are what men 
make them: this is a pronouncement of 
sailor wisdom, and, no doubt, in the main it 
is true. 

However, there are ships where, as an old, 
grizzled mate once told me, " nothing ever 
seems to go right!" And, looking from the 
poop where we both stood (I had paid him a 
neighborly call in dock), he added: "She's 

23 



The Mirror of the Sea 

one of them." He glanced up at my face, 
which expressed a proper professional sym- 
pathy, and set me right in my natural sur- 
mise: "Oh no; the old man's right enough. 
He never interferes. Anything that's done 
in a seaman-like way is good enough for him. 
And yet, somehow, nothing ever seems to go 
right in this ship. I tell you what: she is 
naturally unhandy." 

The "old man," of course, was his cap- 
tain, who just then came on deck in a silk 
hat and brown overcoat, and, with a civil 
nod to us, went ashore. He was certainly 
not more than thirty, and the elderly mate, 
with a murmur to me of "That's my old 
man," proceeded to give instances of the 
natural unhandiness of the ship in a sort of 
deprecatory tone, as if to say, "You mustn't 
think I bear a grudge against her for 
that." 

The instances do not matter. The point 
is that there are ships where things do go 
wrong ; but whatever the ship — good or bad, 
lucky or unlucky — it is in the forepart of 
her that her chief mate feels most at home. 
It is emphatically his end of the ship, 

24 



Emblems of Hope 

though, of course, he is the executive super- 
visor of the whole. There are his anchors, 
his head-gear, his foremast, his station for 
manoeuvring when the captain is in charge. 
And there, too, live the men, the ship's 
hands, whom it is his duty to keep em- 
ployed, fair weather or foul, for the ship's 
welfare. It is the chief mate, the only figure 
of the ship's afterguard, who comes bustling 
forward at the cry of "All hands on deck!" 
He is the satrap of that province in the auto- 
cratic realm of the ship, and more personally 
responsible for anything that may happen 
there. 

There, too, on the approach to the land, 
assisted by the boatswain and the carpenter, 
he "gets the anchors over" with the men of 
his own watch, whom he knows better than 
the others. There he sees the cable ranged, 
the windlass disconnected, the compressors 
opened; and there, after giving his own last 
order, "Stand clear of the cable!" he waits 
attentive, in a silent ship that forges slowly 
ahead towards her picked-out berth, for the 
sharp shout from aft, "Let go!" Instantly 
bending over, he sees the trusty iron fall 

2 5 



The Mirror of the Sea 

with a heavy plunge under his eyes, which 
watch and note whether it has gone clear. 

For the anchor "to go clear" means to go 
clear of its own chain. Your anchor must 
drop from the bow of your ship with no turn 
of cable on any of its limbs, else you would 
be riding to a foul anchor. Unless the pull 
of the cable is fair on the ring, no anchor 
can be trusted even on the best of holding 
ground. In time of stress it is bound to 
drag, for implements and men must be 
treated fairly to give you the " virtue" 
which is in them. The anchor is an em- 
blem of hope, but a foul anchor is worse 
than the most fallacious of false hopes that 
ever lured men or nations into a sense of 
security. And the sense of security, even 
the most warranted, is a bad councillor. It 
is the sense which, like that exaggerated feel- 
ing of well-being ominous of the coming on 
of madness, precedes the swift fall of dis- 
aster. A seaman laboring under an undue 
sense of security becomes at once worth 
hardly half his salt. Therefore, of all my 
chief officers, the one I trusted most was 

a man called B . He had a red mus- 

26 



Emblems of Hope 

tache, a lean face, also red, and an uneasy 
eye. He was worth all his salt. 

On examining now, after many years, the 
residue of the feeling which was the outcome 
of the contact of our personalities, I dis- 
cover, without much surprise, a certain 
flavor of dislike. Upon the whole, I think 
he was one of the most uncomfortable ship- 
mates possible for a young commander. If 
it is permissible to criticise the absent, I 
should say he had a little too much of the 
sense of insecurity which is so invaluable in 
a seaman. He had an extremely disturbing 
air of being everlastingly ready (even when 
seated at table at my right hand before a 
plate of salt beef) to grapple with some im- 
pending calamity. I must hasten to add 
that he had also the other qualification 
necessary to make a trustworthy seaman — 
that of an absolute confidence in himself. 
What was really wrong with him was that 
he had these qualities in an unrestful degree. 
His eternally watchful demeanor, his jerky, 
nervous talk, even his, as it were, deter- 
mined silences, seemed to imply — and, I be- 
lieve, they did imply — that to his mind the 
^ 27 



The Mirror of the Sea 

ship was never safe in my hands. Such was 
the man who looked after the anchors of a 
less than five - hundred - ton bark, my first 
command, now gone from the face of the 
earth, but sure of a tenderly remembered 
existence as long as I live. No anchor could 

have gone down foul under Mr. B 's 

piercing eye. It was good for one to be 
sure of that when, in an open roadstead, one 
heard in the cabin the wind pipe up; but 
still there were moments when I detested 

Mr. B exceedingly. From the way he 

used to glare sometimes, I fancy that more 
than once he paid me back with interest. 
It so happened that we both loved the little 
bark very much. And it was just the de- 
fect of Mr. B 's inestimable qualities that 

he would never persuade himself to believe 
that the ship was safe in my hands. To be- 
gin with, he was more than five years older 
than myself at a time of life when five years 
really do count, I being twenty-nine and he 
thirty-four ; then, on our first leaving port (I 
don't see why I should make a secret of the 
fact that it was Bangkok), a bit of manoeu- 
vring of mine among the islands of the Gulf 

28 



Emblems of Hope 

of Siam had given him an unforgettable scare. 
Ever since then he had nursed in secret a 
bitter idea of my utter recklessness . But upon 
the whole, and unless the grip of a man's hand 
at parting means nothing whatever, I con- 
clude that we did like each other at the end 
of two years and three months well enough. 
The bond between us was the ship; and 
therein a ship, though she has female at- 
tributes and is loved very unreasonably, is 
different from a woman. That I should 
have been tremendously smitten with my 
first command is nothing to wonder at, but 

I suppose I must admit that Mr. B 's 

sentiment was of a higher order. Each of 
us, of course, was extremely anxious about 
the good appearance of the beloved object; 
and, though I was the one to glean compli- 
ments ashore, B had the more intimate 

pride of feeling, resembling that of a devoted 
handmaiden. And that sort of faithful and 
proud devotion went so far as to make him 
go about flicking the dust of! the varnished 
teak-wood rail of the little craft with a silk 
pocket-handkerchief — a present from Mrs. 
B— - — , I believe. 

29 



The Mirror of the Sea 

That was the effect of his love for the 
bark. The effect of his admirable lack of 
the sense of security once went so far as to 
make him remark to me: "Well, sir, you are 
a lucky man!" 

It was said in a tone full of significance, 
but not exactly offensive, and it was, I sup- 
pose, my innate tact that prevented my ask- 
ing, "What on earth do you mean by that?" 

Later on his meaning was illustrated more 
fully on a dark night in a tight corner dur- 
ing a dead on-shore gale. I had called him 
up on deck to help me consider our ex- 
tremely unpleasant situation. There was 
not much time for deep thinking, and his 
summing up was: "It looks pretty bad, 
whichever we try ; but then, sir, you always 
do get out of a mess somehow." 



It is difficult to disconnect the idea of 
ships' anchors from the idea of the ship's 
chief mate — the man who sees them go 
down clear and come up sometimes foul ; be- 
cause not even the most unremitting care 

30 



Emblems of Hope 

can always prevent a ship, swinging to 
winds and tide, from taking an awkward 
turn of the cable round stock or fluke. 
Then the business of "getting the anchor" 
and securing it afterwards is unduly pro- 
longed, and made a weariness to the chief 
mate. He is the man who watches the 
growth of the cable — a sailor's phrase which 
has all the force, precision, and imagery of 
technical language that, created by simple 
men with keen eyes for the real aspect of 
the things they see in their trade, achieves 
the just expression seizing upon the essential, 
which is the ambition of the artist in words. 
Therefore the sailor will never say "cast 
anchor," and the ship-master aft will hail 
his chief mate on the forecastle in impres- 
sionistic phrase: "How does the cable 
grow?" Because "grow" is the right word 
for the long drift of a cable emerging aslant 
under the strain, taut as a bow-string above 
the water. And it is the voice of the keep- 
er of the ship's anchors that will answer: 
"Grows right ahead, sir," or "Broad on the 
bow," or whatever concise and deferential 
shout will fit the case. 

31 



The Mirror of the Sea 

There is no order more noisily given or 
taken up with lustier shouts on board a 
homeward-bound merchant ship than the 
command, "Man the windlass!" The rush 
of expectant men out of the forecastle, the 
snatching of hand-spikes, the tramp of feet, 
the clink of the pawls, make a stirring ac- 
companiment to a plaintive up-anchor song 
with a roaring chorus; and this burst of 
noisy activity from a whole ship's crew 
seems like a voiceful awakening of the ship 
herself, till then, in the picturesque phrase 
of Dutch seamen, "lying asleep upon her 
iron." 

For a ship with her sails furled on her 
squared yards, and reflected from truck to 
water-line in the smooth gleaming sheet of a 
landlocked harbor, seems, indeed, to a sea- 
man's eye the most perfect picture of slum- 
bering repose. The getting of your anchor 
was a noisy operation on board a merchant 
ship of yesterday — an inspiring, joyous 
noise, as if, with the emblem of hope, the 
ship's company expected to drag up out of 
the depths, each man all his personal hopes 
into the reach of a securing hand — the hope 

32 



Emblems of Hope 

of home, the hope of rest, of liberty, of dis- 
sipation, of hard pleasure, following the 
hard endurance of many days between sky 
and water. And this noisiness, this exulta- 
tion at the moment of the ship's departure, 
make a tremendous contrast to the silent 
moments of her arrival in a foreign road- 
stead — the silent moments when, stripped 
of her sails, she forges ahead to her chosen 
berth, the loose canvas fluttering softly in 
the gear above the heads of the men stand- 
ing still upon her decks, the master gazing 
intently forward from the break of the poop. 
Gradually she loses her way, hardly moving, 
with the three figures on her forecastle wait- 
ing attentively about the cat-head for the 
last order of, perhaps, full ninety days at 
sea: "Let go!" 

This is the final word of a ship's ended 
journey, the closing word of her toil and of 
her achievement. In a life whose worth is 
told out in passages from port to port, the 
splash of the anchor's fall and the thunder- 
ous rumbling of the chain are like the closing 
of a distinct period, of which she seems con- 
scious with a slight deep shudder of all her 

33 



The Mirror of the Sea 

frame. By so much is she nearer to her ap- 
pointed death, for neither years nor voyages 
can go on forever. It is to her like the 
striking of a clock, and in the pause which 
follows she seems to take count of the pass- 
ing time. 

This is the last important order ; the others 
are mere routine directions. Once more the 
master is heard: "Give her forty-five fathom 
to the water's edge," and then he, too, is 
done for a time. For days he leaves all the 
harbor work to his chief mate, the keeper of 
the ship's anchor and of the ship's routine. 
For days his voice will not be heard raised 
about the decks, with that curt, austere ac- 
cent of the man in charge, till, again, when 
the hatches are on, and in a silent and ex- 
pectant ship, he shall speak up from aft in 
commanding tones: "Man the w T indlass!" 



The Fine Art 




[HE other year, looking through 
a newspaper of sound princi- 
ples, but whose staff will per- 
sist in "casting" anchors and 
going to sea "on" a ship 
(ough!), I came across an article upon the 
season's yachting. And, behold! it was a 
good article. To a man who had but little 
to do with pleasure sailing (though all sail- 
ing is a pleasure), and certainly nothing 
whatever with racing in open waters, the 
writer's strictures upon the handicapping of 
yachts were just intelligible and no more. 
And I do not pretend to any interest in the 
enumeration of the great races of that year. 
As to the fifty- two-foot linear raters, praised 
so much by the writer, I am warmed up by 
his approval of their performances; but, as 
far as any clear conception goes, the de- 

35 



The Mirror of the Sea 

scriptive phrase, so precise to the compre- 
hension of a yachtsman, evokes no definite 
image in my mind. 

The writer praises that class of pleasure- 
vessels, and I am willing to indorse his 
words, as any man who loves every craft 
afloat would be ready to do. I am disposed 
to admire and respect the fifty-two-foot 
linear raters on the word of a man who 
regrets in such a sympathetic and under- 
standing spirit the threatened decay of 
yachting seamanship. 

Of course, yacht -racing is an organized 
pastime, a function of social idleness min- 
istering to the vanity of certain wealthy in- 
habitants of these isles nearly as much as to 
their inborn love of the sea. But the writer 
of the article in question goes on to point out, 
with insight and justice, that for a great num- 
ber of people (twenty thousand, I think he 
says) it is a means of livelihood — that it is, 
in his own words, an industry. Now, the 
moral side of an industry, productive or un- 
productive, the redeeming and ideal aspect 
of this bread-winning, is the attainment and 
preservation of the highest possible skill on 

36 



The Fine Art 

the part of the craftsmen. Such skill, the 
skill of technique, is more than honesty; it 
is something wider, embracing honesty and 
grace and rule in an elevated and clear senti- 
ment, not altogether utilitarian, which may 
be called the honor of labor. It is made up 
of accumulated tradition, kept alive by in- 
dividual pride, rendered exact by profes- 
sional opinion, and, like the higher arts, it 
is spurred on and sustained by discriminat- 
ing praise. 

This is why the attainment of proficiency, 
the pushing of your skill with attention to 
the most delicate shades of excellence, is a 
matter of vital concern. Efficiency of a 
practically flawless kind may be reached 
naturally in the struggle for bread. But 
there is something beyond — a higher point, 
a subtle and unmistakable touch of love and 
pride beyond mere skill; almost an inspira- 
tion which gives to all work that finish 
which is almost art — which is art. 

As men of scrupulous honor set up a high 
standard of public conscience above the 
dead-level of an honest community, so men 
of that skill which passes into art by cease- 

37 



The Mirror of the Sea 

less striving raise the dead-level of correct 
practice in the crafts of land and sea. The 
conditions fostering the growth of that su- 
preme, alive, excellence, as well in work as 
in play, ought to be preserved with a most 
careful regard lest the industry or the game 
should perish of an insidious and inward de- 
cay. Therefore I have read with profound 
regret, in that article upon the yachting sea- 
son of a certain year, that the seamanship 
on board racing-yachts is not now what it 
used to be only a few, very few, years ago. 

For that was the gist of that article, 
written evidently by a man who not only 
knows but understands — a thing (let me re- 
mark in passing) much rarer than one would 
expect, because the sort of understanding I 
mean depends so much on love; and love, 
though in a sense it may be admitted to be 
stronger than death, is by no means so uni- 
versal and so sure. In fact, love is rare — 
the love of men, of things, of ideas, the love 
of perfected skill. For love is the enemy of 
haste ; it takes count of passing days, of men 
who pass away, of a fine art matured slowly 
in the course of years and doomed in a short 

3§ 



The Fine Art 

time to pass away, too, and be no more. 
Love and regret go hand in hand in this 
world of changes swifter than the shifting of 
the clouds reflected in the mirror of the sea. 

To penalize a yacht in proportion to the 
fineness of her performance is unfair to the 
craft and to her men. It is unfair to the 
perfection of her form and to the skill of her 
servants. For we men are, in fact, the ser- 
vants of our creations. We remain in ever- 
lasting bondage to the productions of our 
brain and to the work of our hands. A man 
is born to serve his time on this earth, and 
there is something fine in the service being 
given on other grounds than that of utility. 
The bondage of art is very exacting. And, 
as the writer of the article which started this 
train of thought says with lovable warmth, 
the sailing of yachts is a fine art. 

His contention is that racing, without 
time allowances for anything else but ton- 
nage — that is, for size — has fostered the fine 
art of sailing to the pitch of perfection. 
Every sort of demand is made upon the 
master of a sailing-yacht, and to be penalized 
in proportion to your success may be of 

39 



The Mirror of the Sea 

advantage to the sport itself, but it has an 
obviously deteriorating effect upon the sea- 
manship. The fine art is being lost. 



The sailing and racing of yachts has de- 
veloped a class of fore-and-aft sailors, men 
born and bred to the sea, fishing in winter 
and yachting in summer; men to whom the 
handling of that particular rig presents no 
mystery. It is their striving for victory 
that has elevated the sailing of pleasure- 
craft to the dignity of a fine art in that 
special sense. As I have said, I know noth- 
ing of racing and but little of fore-and-aft 
rig; but the advantages of such a rig are 
obvious, especially for purposes of pleasure, 
whether in cruising or racing. It requires 
less effort in handling; the trimming of the 
sail-planes to the wind can be done with 
speed and accuracy; the unbroken spread of 
the sail -area is of infinite advantage; and 
the greatest possible amount of canvas can 
be displayed upon the least possible quan- 
tity of spars. Lightness and concentrated 

40 



The Fine Art 

power are the great qualities of fore-and- 
aft rig. 

A fleet of fore-and-afters at anchor has its 
own slender graciousness. The setting of 
their sails resembles more than anything else 
the unfolding of a bird's wings; the facility 
of their evolutions is a pleasure to the eye. 
They are birds of the sea, whose swimming 
is like flying, and resembles more a natural 
function than the handling of man-invented 
appliances. The fore-and-aft rig in its sim- 
plicity and the beauty of its aspect under 
every angle of vision is, I believe, unap- 
proachable. A schooner, yawl, or cutter in 
charge of a capable man seems to handle 
herself as if endowed with the power of rea- 
soning and the gift of swift execution. One 
laughs with sheer pleasure at a smart piece 
of manoeuvring, as at a manifestation of 
a living creature's quick wit and graceful 
precision. 

Of those three varieties of fore-and-aft rig, 
the cutter — the racing rig par excellence — is of 
an appearance the most imposing, from the 
fact that practically all her canvas is in one 
piece. The enormous mainsail of a cutter, 

41 



The Mirror of the Sea 

as she draws slowly past a point of land or 
the end of a jetty under your admiring gaze, 
invests her with an air of lofty and silent 
majesty. At anchor a schooner looks bet- 
ter; she has an aspect of greater efficiency 
and a better balance to the eye, with her 
two masts distributed over the hull with a 
swaggering rake aft. The yawl rig one 
comes in time to love. It is, I should think, 
the easiest of all to manage. 

For racing, a cutter; for a long pleasure 
voyage, a schooner; for cruising in home 
waters, the yawl; and the handling of them 
all is indeed a fine art. It requires not only 
the knowledge of the general principles of 
sailing, but a particular acquaintance with 
the character of the craft. All vessels are 
handled in the same way as far as theory 
goes, just as you may deal with all men on 
broad and rigid principles. But if you 
want that success in life which comes from 
the affection and confidence of your fellows, 
then with no two men, however similar they 
may appear in their nature, will you deal in 
the same way. There may be a rule of con- 
duct; there is no rule of human fellowship. 

42 



The Fine Art 

To deal with men is as fine an art as it is to deal 
with ships. Both men and ships live in an un- 
stable element, are subject to subtle and pow- 
erful influences, and want to have their merits 
understood rather than their faults found out. 

It is not what your ship will not do that 
you want to know to get on terms of suc- 
cessful partnership with her; it is, rather, 
that you ought to have a precise knowledge 
of what she will do for you when called upon 
to put forth what is in her by a sympathetic 
touch. At first sight the difference does not 
seem great in either line of dealing with the 
difficult problem of limitations. But the 
difference is great. The difference lies in 
the spirit in which the problem is approach- 
ed. After all, the art of handling ships is 
finer, perhaps, than the art of handling men. 

And, like all fine arts, it must be based 
upon a broad, solid sincerity, which, like a 
law of nature, rules an infinity of different 
phenomena. Your endeavor must be single- 
minded. You would talk differently to a 
coal-heaver and to a professor. But is this 
duplicity? I deny it. The truth consists 
in the genuineness of the feeling, in the 
* 43 



The Mirror of the Sea 

genuine recognition of the two men, so 
similar and so different, as your two partners 
in the hazard of life. Obviously, a humbug, 
thinking only of winning his little race, 
would stand a chance of profiting by his 
artifices. Men, professors or coal-heavers, 
are easily deceived; they even have an ex- 
traordinary knack of lending themselves to 
deception, a sort of curious and inexplicable 
propensity to allow themselves to be led by 
the nose with their eyes open. But a ship is 
a creature which we have brought into the 
world, as it were, on purpose to keep us up 
to the mark. In her handling, a ship will 
not put up with a mere pretender, as, for in- 
stance, the public will do with Mr. X, the 
popular statesman ; Mr. Y, the popular scien- 
tist, or Mr. Z, the popular — what shall we 
say ? — anything from a teacher of high 
morality to a bagman — who have won their 
little race. But I would like (though not 
accustomed to betting) to wager a large sum 
that not one of the few first-rate skippers of 
racing-yachts has ever been a humbug. It 
would have been too difficult. The diffi- 
culty arises from the fact that one does not 

44 



The Fine Art 

deal with ships in a mob, but with a ship as 
an individual. So we may have to do with 
men. But in each of us there lurks some 
particle of the mob spirit, of the mob tem- 
perament. No matter how earnestly we 
strive against each other, we remain brothers 
on the lowest side of our intellect and in the 
instability of our feelings. With ships it is 
not so. Much as they are to us, they are 
nothing to each other. Those sensitive 
creatures have no ears for our blandish- 
ments. It takes something more than words 
to cajole them to do our will, to cover us 
with glory. Luckily, too, or else there 
would have been more shoddy reputations 
for first - rate seamanship. Ships have no 
ears, I repeat, though, indeed, I think I have 
known ships who really seemed to have had 
eyes, or else I cannot understand on what 
ground a certain one-thousa nd-ton bark of 
my acquaintance on one particular occasion 
refused to answer her helm, thereby saving 
a frightful smash to two ships and to a very 
good man's reputation. I knew her inti- 
mately for two years, and in no other in- 
stance either before or since have I known 

45 



The Mirror of the Sea 

her to do that thing. The man she had 
served so well (guessing, perhaps, at the 
depths of his affection for her), I have 
known much longer, and in bare justice to 
him I must say that this confidence-shatter- 
ing experience (though so fortunate) only 
augmented his trust in her. Yes, our ships 
have no ears, and thus they cannot be de- 
ceived. I would illustrate my idea of 
fidelity as between man and ship, between 
the master and his art, by a statement 
which, though it might appear shockingly 
sophisticated, is really very simple. I would 
say that a racing-yacht skipper who thought 
of nothing else but the glory of winning the 
race would never attain to any eminence of 
reputation. The genuine masters of their 
craft — I say this confidently from my ex- 
perience of ships — have thought of nothing 
but of doing their very best by the vessel 
under their charge. To forget one's self, to 
surrender all personal feeling in the service of 
that fine art, is the only way for a seaman to 
accomplish the faithful discharge of his trust. 
Such is the service of a fine art and of 
ships that sail the sea. And therein I 

46 



The Fine Art 

think I can lay my finger upon the differ- 
ence between the seamen of yesterday, who 
are still with us, and the seamen of to- 
morrow, already entered upon the posses- 
sion of their inheritance. History repeats 
itself, but the special call of an art which 
has passed away is never reproduced. It is 
as utterly gone out of the world as the song 
of a destroyed wild bird. Nothing will 
awaken the same response of pleasurable 
emotion or conscientious endeavor. And 
the sailing of any vessel afloat is an art 
whose fine form seems already receding 
from us on its way to the overshadowed 
Valley of Oblivion. The taking of a mod- 
ern steamship about the world (though one 
would not minimize its responsibilities) has 
not the same quality of intimacy with 
nature, which, after all, is an indispensable 
condition to the building up of an art. It 
is less personal and a more exact calling; 
less arduous, but also less gratifying in the 
lack of close communion between the artist 
and the medium of his art. It is, in short, 
less a matter of love. Its effects are meas- 
ured exactly in time and space as no effect 

47 



The Mirror of the Sea 

of an art can be. It is an occupation which 
a man not desperately subject to sea-sickness 
can be imagined to follow with content, 
without enthusiasm, with industry, without 
affection. Punctuality is its watchword. 
The incertitude which attends closely every 
artistic endeavor is absent from its regulated 
enterprise. It has no great moments of self- 
confidence, or moments not less great of 
doubt and heart - searching. It is an in- 
dustry which, like other industries, has its 
romance, its honor, and its rewards, its bitter 
anxieties and its hours of ease. But such 
sea-going has not the artistic quality of a 
single-handed struggle with something much 
greater than yourself; it is not the laborious, 
absorbing practice of an art whose ultimate 
result remains on the knees of the gods. It 
is not an individual, temperamental achieve- 
ment, but simply the skilled use of a capt- 
ured force, merely another step forward upon 
the way of universal conquest. 



Every passage of a ship of yesterday, 
whose yards were braced round eagerly the 

48 



The Fine Art 

very moment the pilot, with his pockets full 
of letters, had got over the side, was like a 
race — a race against time, against an ideal 
standard of achievement outstripping the 
expectations of common men. Like all true 
art, the general conduct of a ship and her 
handling in particular cases had a technique 
which could be discussed with delight and 
pleasure by men who found in their work 
not bread alone, but an outlet for the pecu- 
liarities of their temperament. To get the 
best and truest effect from the infinitely 
varying moods of sky and sea, not pictori- 
ally, but in the spirit of their calling, was 
their vocation, one and all; and they recog- 
nized this with as much sincerity, and drew 
as much inspiration from this reality, as any 
man who ever put brush to canvas. The 
diversity of temperaments was immense 
among those masters of the fine art. 

Some of them were like Royal Academi- 
cians of a certain kind. They never startled 
you by a touch of originality, by a fresh 
audacity of inspiration. They were safe, 
very safe. They went about solemnly in 
the assurance of their consecrated and 

49 



The Mirror of the Sea 

empty reputation. Names are odious, but 
I remember one of them who might have 
been their very president, the P.R.A. of the 
sea-craft. His weather-beaten and hand- 
some face, his portly presence, his shirt- 
fronts and broad cuffs and gold links, his 
air of bluff distinction, impressed the humble 
beholders (stevedores, tally - clerks, tide- 
waiters) as he walked ashore over the gang- 
way of his ship lying at the Circular Quay in 
Sydney. His voice was deep, hearty, and 
authoritative — the voice of a very prince 
among sailors. He did everything with an 
air which put your attention on the alert 
and raised your expectations, but the result 
somehow was always on stereotyped lines, 
unsuggestive, empty of any lesson that one 
could lay to heart. He kept his ship in 
apple-pie order, which would have been sea- 
man-like enough but for a finicking touch in 
its details. His officers affected a superi- 
ority over the rest of us, but the boredom of 
their souls appeared in their manner of 
dreary submission to the fads of their com- 
mander. It was only his apprenticed boys 
whose irrepressible spirits were not affected 

50 



The Fine Art 

by the solemn and respectable mediocrity of 
that artist. There were four of these young- 
sters: one the son of a doctor, another of a 
colonel, the third of a jeweller; the name of 
the fourth was Twenty man, and this is all I 
remember of his parentage. But not one of 
them seemed to possess the smallest spark 
of gratitude in his composition. Though 
their commander was a kind man in his way, 
and had made a point of introducing them 
to the best people in the town in order that 
they should not fall into the bad company 
of boys belonging to other ships, I regret to 
say that they made faces at him behind his 
back, and imitated the dignified carriage of 
his head without any concealment whatever. 
This master of the fine art was a person- 
age and nothing more; but, as I have said, 
there was an infinite diversity of tempera- 
ment among the masters of the fine art I 
have known. Some were great impression- 
ists. They impressed upon you the fear of 
God and Immensity — or, in other words, the 
fear of being drowned with every circum- 
stance of terrific grandeur. One may think 
that the locality of your passing away by 

Si 



The Mirror of the Sea 

means of suffocation in water does not real- 
ly matter very much. I am not so sure of 
that. I am, perhaps, unduly sensitive, but 
I confess that the idea of being suddenly 
spilled into an infuriated ocean in the midst 
of darkness and uproar affected me always 
with a sensation of shrinking distaste. To 
be drowned in a pond, though it might be 
called an ignominious fate by the ignorant, 
is yet a bright and peaceful ending in com- 
parison with some other endings to one's 
earthly career which I have mentally quaked 
at in the intervals or even in the midst of 
violent exertions. 

But let that pass. Some of the masters 
whose influence left a trace upon my char- 
acter to this very day, combined a fierceness 
of conception with a certitude of execution 
upon the basis of just appreciation of means 
and ends which is the highest quality of the 
man of action. And an artist is a man of 
action, whether he creates a personality, in- 
vents an expedient, or finds the issue of a 
complicated situation. 

There were masters, too, I have known, 
whose very art consisted in avoiding every 

5 2 



The Fine Art 

conceivable situation. It is needless to say 
that they never did great things in their 
craft; but they were not to be despised for 
that. They were modest; they understood 
their limitations. Their own masters had 
not handed the sacred fire into the keeping 
of their cold and skilful hands. One of 
those last I remember specially, now gone to 
his rest from that sea which his tempera- 
ment must have made a scene of little more 
than a peaceful pursuit. Once only did he 
attempt a stroke of audacity, one early 
morning, with a steady breeze, entering a 
crowded roadstead. But he was not genuine 
in this display which might have been art. 
He was thinking of his own self ; he hankered 
after the meretricious glory of a showy per- 
formance. 

As, rounding a dark, wooded point, 
bathed in fresh air and sunshine, we opened 
to view a crowd of shipping at anchor lying 
half a mile ahead of us perhaps, he called me 
aft from my station on the forecastle head, 
and, turning over and over his binoculars in 
his brown hands, said: " Do you see that big, 
heavy ship with white lower masts? I am 

S3 



The Mirror of the Sea 

going to take up a berth between her and 
the shore. Now do you see to it that the 
men jump smartly at the first order." 

I answered "Ay, ay, sir," and verily be- 
lieved that this would be a fine perform- 
ance. We dashed on through the fleet in 
magnificent style. There must have been 
many open mouths and following eyes on 
board those ships — Dutch, English, with a 
sprinkling of Americans and a German or 
two — who had all hoisted their flags at eight 
o'clock as if in honor of our arrival. It 
would have been a fine performance if it had 
come off, but it did not. Through a touch 
of self-seeking that modest artist of solid 
merit became untrue to his temperament. 
It was not with him art for art's sake: it was 
art for his own sake; and a dismal failure 
was the penalty he paid for that greatest of 
sins. It might have been even heavier, but, 
as it happened, we did not run our ship 
ashore, nor did we knock a large hole in the 
big ship whose lower masts were painted 
white. But it is a wonder that we did not 
carry away the cables of both our anchors, 
for, as may be imagined, I did not stand 

54 



The Fine Art 

upon the order to "Let go!" that came to 
me in a quavering, quite unknown voice 
from his trembling lips. I let them both go 
with a celerity which to this day astonishes 
my memory. No average merchantman's 
anchors have ever been let go with such 
miraculous smartness. And they both held. 
I could have kissed their rough, cold iron 
palms in gratitude if they had not been 
buried in slimy mud under ten fathoms of 
water. Ultimately they brought us up with 
the jib-boom of a Dutch brig poking through 
our spanker — nothing worse. And a miss is 
as good as a mile. 

But not in art. Afterwards the master 
said to me in a shy mumble, "She wouldn't 
luff up in time, somehow. What's the mat- 
ter with her?" And I made no answer. 

Yet the answer was clear. The ship had 
found out the momentary weakness of her 
man. Of all the living creatures upon land 
and sea, it is ships alone that cannot be 
taken in by barren pretences, that will not 
put up with bad art from their masters. 




Cobwebs and Gossamer 



'ROM the main truck of the av- 
erage tall ship the horizon de- 
scribes a circle of many miles, 
in which you can see another 
ship right down to her water- 
line; and these very eyes which follow this 
writing have counted in their time over a 
hundred sail becalmed, as if within a magic 
ring, not very far from the Azores — ships 
more or less tall. There were hardly two of 
them heading exactly the same way, as if 
each had meditated breaking out of the en- 
chanted circle at a different point of the 
compass. But the spell of the calm is a 
strong magic. The following day still saw 
them scattered within sight of one another 
and heading different ways; but when, at 
last, the breeze came with the darkling ripple 
that ran very blue on a pale sea, they all 

56 






Cobwebs and Gossamer 

went in the same direction together. For 
this was the homeward-bound fleet from the 
far-off ends of the earth, and a Falmouth 
fruit-schooner, the smallest of them all, was 
heading the flight. One could have imag- 
ined her very fair, if not divinely tall, leaving 
a scent of lemons and oranges in her wake. 

The next day there were very few ships in 
sight from our mast-heads — seven at most, 
perhaps, with a few more distant specks, hull 
down, beyond the magic ring of the horizon. 
The spell of the fair wind has a subtle power 
to scatter a white-winged company of ships 
looking all the same way, each with its white 
fillet of tumbling foam under the bow. It is 
the calm that brings ships mysteriously to- 
gether; it is your wind that is the great 
separator. 

The taller the ship, the farther she can be 
seen; and her white tallness breathed upon 
by the wind first proclaims her size. The 
tall masts holding aloft the white canvas, 
spread out like a snare for catching the in- 
visible power of the air, emerge gradually 
from the water, sail after sail, yard after 
yard, growing big, till, under the towering 

57 



The Mirror of the Sea 

structure of her machinery, you perceive the 
insignificant, tiny speck of her hull. 

The tall masts are the pillars supporting 
the balanced planes that, motionless and 
silent, catch from the air the ship's motive 
power, as it were a gift from heaven vouch- 
safed to the audacity of man; and it is the 
ship's tall spars, stripped and shorn of their 
white glory, that incline themselves before 
the anger of the clouded heaven. 

When they yield to a squall in a gaunt and 
naked submission their tallness is brought 
best home even to the mind of a seaman. The 
man who has looked upon his ship going over 
too far is made aware of the preposterous tall- 
ness of a ship's spars. It seems impossible 
but that those gilt trucks which one had to 
tilt one's head back to see, now falling into 
the lower plane of vision, must perforce hit 
the very edge of the horizon. Such an ex- 
perience gives you a better impression of the 
loftiness of your spars than any amount of 
running aloft could do. And yet in my time 
the royal yards of an average profitable ship 
were a good way up above her decks. 

No doubt a fair amount of climbing up 

58 



Cobwebs and Gossamer 

iron ladders can be achieved by an active 
man in a ship's engine-room, but I remem- 
ber moments when even to my supple limbs 
and pride of nimbleness the sailing-ship's ma- 
chinery seemed to reach up to the very stars. 
For machinery it is, doing its work in 
perfect silence and with a motionless grace, 
that seems to hide a capricious and not 
always governable power, taking nothing 
away from the material stores of the earth. 
Not for it the unerring precision of steel 
moved by white steam and living by red fire 
and fed with black coal. The other seems to 
draw its strength from the very soul of the 
world, its formidable ally, held to obedience 
by the frailest bonds, like a fierce ghost capt- 
ured in a snare of something even finer than 
spun silk. For what is the array of the strong- 
est ropes, the tallest spars, and the stoutest 
canvas against the mighty breath of the infi- 
nite but thistle stalks, cob webs, and gossamer ? 



Indeed, it is less than nothing, and I have 
seen, when the great soul of the world turned 
5 59 



The Mirror of the Sea 

over with a heavy sigh, a perfectly new, ex- 
tra stout foresail vanish like a bit of some 
airy stuff much lighter than gossamer. 
Then was the time for the tall spars to 
stand fast in the great uproar. The ma- 
chinery must do its work even if the soul of 
the world has gone mad. 

The modern steamship advances upon a 
still and overshadowed sea with a pulsating 
tremor of her frame, an occasional clang in 
her depths, as if she had an iron heart in 
her iron body; with a thudding rhythm in 
her progress and the regular beat of her pro- 
peller, heard afar in the night with an 
august and plodding sound as of the march 
of an inevitable future. But in a gale, the 
silent machinery of a sailing-ship would 
catch not only the power, but the wild and 
exulting voice of the world's soul. Whether 
she ran with her tall spars swinging, or 
breasted it with her tall spars lying over, 
there was always that wild song, deep like a 
chant, for a bass to the shrill pipe of the 
wind played on the sea-tops, w T ith a punctu- 
ating crash, now and then, of a breaking 
wave. At times the weird effects of that 

60 



Cobwebs and Gossamer 

invisible orchestra would get upon a man's 
nerves till he wished himself deaf. 

And this recollection of a personal wish, 
experienced upon several oceans, where the 
soul of the world has plenty of room to turn 
over with a mighty sigh, brings me to the 
remark that in order to take a proper care 
of a ship's spars it is just as well for a sea- 
man to have nothing the matter with his 
ears. Such is the intimacy with which a 
seaman had to live with his ship of yester- 
day that his senses were like her senses, that 
the stress upon his body made him judge of 
the strain upon the ship's masts. 

I had been some time at sea before I be- 
came aware of the fact that hearing plays a 
perceptible part in gauging the force of the 
wind. It was at night. The ship was one 
of those iron wool-clippers that the Clyde 
had floated out in swarms upon the world 
during the seventh decade of the last cen- 
tury. It was a fine period in ship -building, 
and also, I might say, a period of over- 
masting. The spars rigged up on the nar- 
row hulls were indeed tall then, and the 
ship of which I think, with her colored- 

61 



The Mirror of the Sea 

glass skylight ends, bearing the motto, "Let 
Glasgow Flourish," was certainly one of the 
most heavily sparred specimens. She was 
built for hard driving, and unquestionably 
she got all the driving she could stand. 
Our captain was a man famous for the 
quick passages he had been used to make in 
the old Tweed, a ship famous the world over 
for her speed. The Tweed had been a 
wooden vessel, and he brought the tradition 
of quick passages with him into the iron clip- 
per. I was the junior in her, a third mate, 
keeping watch with the chief officer; and it 
was just during one of the night-watches in 
a strong, freshening breeze that I overheard 
two men in a sheltered nook of the main- 
deck exchanging these informing remarks. 
Said one: 

" Should think 'twas time some of them 
light sails were coming off her." 

And the other, an older man, uttered 
grumpily : 

"No fear! not while the chief mate's on 
deck. He's that deaf he can't tell how 
much wind there is." 

And, indeed, poor P , quite young, 

62 



Cobwebs and Gossamer 

and a smart seaman, was very hard of hear- 
ing. At the same time, he had the name of 
being the very devil of a fellow for carrying 
on sail on a ship. He was wonderfully 
clever at concealing his deafness, and, as to 
carrying on heavily, though he was a fear- 
less man, I don't think that he ever meant 
to take undue risks. I can never forget his 
naive sort of astonishment when remon- 
strated with for what appeared a most dare- 
devil performance. The only person, of 
course, that could remonstrate with telling 
effect was our captain, himself a man of 
dare-devil tradition; and really, for me, who 
knew under whom I was serving, those were 

impressive scenes. Captain S had a 

great name for sailor-like qualities — the sort 
of name that compelled my youthful ad- 
miration. To this day I preserve his mem- 
ory, for, indeed, it was he in a sense who 
completed my training. It was often a 
stormy process, but let that pass. I am 
sure he meant well, and I am certain that 
never, not even at the time, could I bear 
him malice for his extraordinary gift of in- 
cisive criticism. And to hear him make a 

63 



The Mirror of the Sea 

fuss about too much sail on the ship seemed 
one of those incredible experiences that take 
place only in one's dreams. 

It generally happened in this way: Night, 
clouds racing overhead, wind howling, royals 
set, and the ship rushing on in the dark, an 
immense white sheet of foam level with the 

lee rail. Mr. P , in charge of the deck, 

hooked on to the windward mizzen -rigging 
in a state of perfect serenity; myself, the 
third mate, also hooked on somewhere to 
windward of the slanting poop, in a state of 
the utmost preparedness to jump at the 
very first hint of some sort of order, but 
otherwise in a perfectly acquiescent state 
of mind. Suddenly, out of the companion 
would appear a tall, dark figure, bareheaded, 
with a short, white beard of a perpendicular 

cut, very visible in the dark — Captain S , 

disturbed in his reading down below by the 
frightful bounding and lurching of the ship. 
Leaning very much against the precipitous 
incline of the deck, he would take a turn or 
two, perfectly silent, hang on by the com- 
pass for a while, take another couple of 
turns, and suddenly burst out: 

64 



Cobwebs and Gossamer 

"What are you trying to do with the 
ship?" 

And Mr. P , who was not good at 

catching what was shouted in the wind, 
would say, interrogatively: 

"Yes, sir?" 

Then in the increasing gale of the sea 
there would be a little private ship's storm 
going on in which you could detect strong 
language, pronounced in a tone of passion 
and exculpatory protestations uttered with 
every possible inflection of injured innocence. 

"By Heavens, Mr. P ! I used to carry 

on sail in my time, but — " 

And the rest would be lost to me in a 
stormy gust of wind. 

Then, in a lull, P 's protesting inno- 
cence would become audible: 

"She seems to stand it very well." 

And then another burst of an indignant 
voice : 

"Any fool can carry sail on a ship — " 

And so on, and so on, the ship meanwhile 
rushing on her way with a heavier list, a 
noisier splutter, a more threatening hiss of 
the white, almost blinding, sheet of foam to 

65 



The Mirror of the Sea 

leeward. For the best of it was that Cap- 
tain S seemed constitutionally incapa- 
ble of giving his officers a definite order to 
shorten sail; and so that extraordinarily 
vague row would go on till at last it dawned 
upon them both, in some particularly alarm- 
ing gust, that it was time to do something. 
There is nothing like the fearful inclination 
of your tall spars overloaded with canvas to 
bring a deaf man and an angry one to their 
senses. 



So sail did get shortened more or less in 
time even in that ship, and her tall spars 
never went overboard while I served in her. 
However, all the time I was with them, 

Captain S and Mr. P did not get 

on very well together. If P carried on 

"like the very devil" because he was too 
deaf to know how much wind there was, 

Captain S (who, as I have said, seemed 

constitutionally incapable of ordering one of 
his officers to shorten sail) resented the 

necessity forced upon him by Mr. P 's 

66 



Cobwebs and Gossamer 

desperate goings on. It was in Captain 
S 's tradition rather to reprove his offi- 
cers for not carrying on quite enough — in his 
phrase, "for not taking every ounce of ad- 
vantage of a fair wind." But there was 
also a psychological motive that made him 
extremely difficult to deal with on board 
that iron clipper. He had just come out of 
the marvellous Tweed, a ship, I have heard, 
heavy to look at but of phenomenal speed. 
In the middle sixties she had beaten by a 
day and a half the steam mail-boat from 
Hong-Kong to Singapore. There was some- 
thing peculiarly lucky, perhaps, in the 
placing of her masts — who knows ? Officers 
of men-of-war used to come on board to 
take the exact dimensions of her sail-plan. 
Perhaps there had been a touch of genius or 
the finger of good-fortune in the fashioning 
of her lines at bow and stern. It is impos- 
sible to say. She was built in the East 
Indies somewhere, of teak-wood through- 
out, except the deck. She had a great 
sheer, high bows, and a clumsy stern. The 
men who had seen her described her to me 
as "nothing much to look at." But in the 

67 



The Mirror of the Sea 

great Indian famine of the seventies that 
ship, already old then, made some wonder- 
ful dashes across the Gulf of Bengal with 
cargoes of rice from Rangoon to Madras. 

She took the secret of her speed with her, 
and, unsightly as she was, her image surely 
has its glorious place in the mirror of the old 
sea. 

The point, however, is that Captain S , 

who used to say, frequently, "She never 
made a decent passage after I left her," 
seemed to think that the secret of her speed 
lay in her famous commander. No doubt 
the secret of many a ship's excellence does 
lie with the man on board, but it was hope- 
less for Captain S to try to make his 

new iron clipper equal the feats which made 
the old Tweed a name of praise upon the lips 
of English - speaking seaman. There was 
something pathetic in it, as in the endeavor 
of an artist in his old age to equal the master- 
pieces of his youth — for the Tweed's famous 

passages were Captain S 's masterpieces. 

It was pathetic, and perhaps just the least 
bit dangerous. At any rate, I am glad that, 

what between Captain S 's yearning for 

68 



Cobwebs and Gossamer 

old triumphs and Mr. P 's deafness, I 

have seen some memorable carrying on to 
make a passage. And I have carried on 
myself upon the tall spars of that Clyde 
ship -builder's masterpiece as I have never 
carried on in a ship before or since. 

The second mate falling ill during the 
passage, I was promoted to officer of the 
watch, alone in charge of the deck. Thus 
the immense leverage of the ship's tall 
masts became a matter very near my own 
heart. I suppose it was something of a 
compliment for a young fellow to be trust- 
ed, apparently without any supervision, by 

such a commander as Captain S ; though, 

as far as I can remember, neither the tone, 
nor the manner, nor yet the drift of Captain 

S 's remarks addressed to myself did 

ever, by the most strained interpretation, 
imply a favorable opinion of my abilities. 
And he was, I must say, a most uncomfort- 
able commander to get your orders from at 
night. If I had the watch from eight till 
midnight, he would leave the deck about 
nine with the words, " Don't take any sail 
off her." Then, on the point of disappear- 

69 



The Mirror of the Sea 

ing down the companion-way, he would add, 
curtly: "Don't carry anything away." I 
am glad to say that I never did; one night, 
however, I was caught not quite prepared 
by a sudden shift of wind. 

There was, of course, a good deal of noise 
— running about, the shouts of the sailors, 
the thrashing of the sails — enough, in fact, 

to wake the dead. But S never came 

on deck. When I was relieved by the chief 
mate an hour afterwards, he sent for me. I 
went into his state-room; he was lying on 
his couch wrapped up in a rug, with a pillow 
under his head. 

" What was the matter with you up there 
just now?" he asked. 

"Wind flew round on the lee quarter, sir," 
I said. 

"Couldn't you see the shift coming?" 

"Yes, sir, I thought it wasn't very far 
off." 

"Why didn't you have your courses haul- 
ed up at once, then?" he asked, in a tone 
that ought to have made my blood run cold. 

But this was my chance, and I did not let 
it slip. 

70 



Cobwebs and Gossamer 

"Well, sir," I said in an apologetic tone, 
" she was going eleven knots very nicely, and 
I thought she would do for another half- 
hour or so." 

He gazed at me darkly out of his head, 
lying very still on the white pillow for a 
time. 

"Ah, yes, another half -hour. That's the 
way ships get dismasted." 

And that was all I got in the way of a 
wigging. I waited a little while, and then 
went out, shutting carefully the door of the 
state-room after me. 

Well, I have loved, lived with, and left 
the sea without ever seeing a ship's tall 
fabric of sticks, cobwebs, and gossamer go 
by the board. Sheer good luck, no doubt. 

But as to poor P , I am sure that he 

would not have got off scot-free like this 
but for the god of gales, who called him 
away soon from this earth, which is three 
parts ocean, and therefore a fit abode for 
sailors. A few years afterwards I met in an 
Indian port a man who had served in the 
ships of the same company. Names came 
up in our talk, names of our colleagues in 

7 1 



The Mirror of the Sea 

the same employ, and, naturally enough, I 
asked after P . Had he got a com- 
mand yet? And the other man answered, 
carelessly : 

'No; but he's provided for, anyhow. 
A heavy sea took him off the poop in 
the run between New Zealand and the 
Horn." 

Thus P passed away from among the 

tall spars of ships that he had tried to their 
utmost in many a spell of boisterous weather. 
He had shown me what carrying on meant, 
but he was not a man to learn discretion 
from. He could not help his deafness. One 
can only remember his cheery temper, his 
admiration for the jokes in Punch, his little 
oddities — like his strange passion for bor- 
rowing looking-glasses, for instance. Each 
of our cabins had its own looking - glass 
screwed to the bulkhead, and what he 
wanted with more of them we never could 
fathom. He asked for the loan in confi- 
dential tones. Why? Mystery. We made 
various surmises. No one will ever know 
now. At any rate, it was a harmless eccen- 
tricity, and may the god of gales, who took 

72 



Cobwebs and Gossamer 

him away so abruptly between New Zealand 
and the Horn, let his soul rest in some para- 
dise of true seamen, where no amount of 
carrying on will ever dismast a ship. 




The Weight of the Burden 



IHERE has been a time when a 
ship's chief mate, pocket-book 
in hand and pencil behind his 
ear, kept one eye aloft upon his 
riggers and the other down the 
hatchway on the stevedores, and watched 
the disposition of his ship's cargo, knowing 
that even before she started he was already 
doing his best to secure for her an easy and 
quick passage. 

The hurry of the times, the loading and 
discharging organization of the docks, the 
use of hoisting machinery which works 
quickly and will not wait, the cry for prompt 
despatch, the very size of his ship, stand 
nowadays between the modern seaman and 
the thorough knowledge of his craft. 

There are profitable ships and unprofit- 
able ships. The profitable ship will carry a 

74 



The Weight of the Burden 

large load through all the hazards of the 
weather, and, when at rest, will stand up in 
dock and shift from berth to berth without 
ballast. There is a point of perfection in 
a ship as a worker when she is spoken of 
as being able to sail without ballast. I 
have never met that sort of paragon myself, 
but I have seen these paragons advertised 
among ships for sale. Such excess of virtue 
and good-nature on the part of a ship always 
provoked my mistrust. It is open to any 
man to say that his ship will sail without 
ballast; and he will say it, too, with every 
mark of profound conviction, especially if he 
is not going to sail in her himself. The risk 
of advertising her as able to sail without bal- 
last is not great, since the statement does 
not imply a warranty of her arriving any- 
where. Moreover, it is strictly true that most 
ships will sail without ballast for some little 
time before they turn turtle upon the crew. 

A ship-owner loves a profitable ship; the 
seaman is proud of her; a doubt of her good 
looks seldom exists in his mind; but if he 
can boast of her more useful qualities it is 
an added satisfaction for his self-love. 
6 75 



The Mirror of the Sea 

The loading of ships was once a matter 
of skill, judgment, and knowledge. Thick 
books have been written about it. Stevens 
on Stowage is a portly volume with the re- 
nown and w T eight (in its own world) of Coke 
on Littleton. Stevens is an agreeable writer, 
and, as is the case w T ith men of talent, his 
gifts adorn his sterling soundness. He gives 
you the official teaching on the whole sub- 
ject, is precise as to rules, mentions illustra- 
tive events, quotes law cases where verdicts 
turned upon a point of stowage. He is 
never pedantic, and, for all his close ad- 
herence to broad principles, he is ready to 
admit that no two ships can be treated ex- 
actly alike. 

Stevedoring, w T hich had been a skilled 
labor, is fast becoming a labor without the 
skill. The modern steamship with her many 
holds is not loaded within the sailor-like 
meaning of the word. She is filled up. Her 
cargo is not stowed in any sense ; it is simply 
dumped into her through six hatchways, 
more or less, by twelve Winches or so, with 
clatter and hurry and racket and heat, in a 
cloud of steam and a mess of coal-dust. As 

76 



The Weight of the Burden 

long as you keep her propeller under water, 
and take care, say, not to fling down barrels 
of oil on top of bales of silk, or deposit an 
iron bridge-girder of five ton or so upon a 
bed of coffee-bags, you have done about all 
in the way of duty that the cry for prompt 
despatch will allow you to do. 



The sailing-ship, when I knew her in her 
days of perfection, was a sensible creature. 
When I say her days of perfection, I mean 
perfection of build, gear, seaworthy qualities 
and ease of handling, not the perfection of 
speed. That quality has departed with the 
change of building material. No iron ship 
of yesterday ever attained the marvels of 
speed which the seamanship of men famous 
in their time had obtained from their wood- 
en, copper-sheeted predecessors. Everything 
had been done to make the iron ship per- 
fect, but no wit of man had managed to de- 
vise an efficient coating composition to keep 
her bottom clean with the smooth cleanness 
of yellow metal-sheeting. After a spell of a 

77 



The Mirror of the Sea 

few weeks at sea, an iron ship begins to lag 
as if she had grown tired too soon. It is 
only her bottom that is getting foul. A 
very little affects the speed of an iron ship 
which is not driven on by a merciless pro- 
peller. Often it is impossible to tell what 
inconsiderate trifle puts her off her stride. 
A certain mysteriousness hangs around the 
quality of speed as it was displayed by the 
old sailing-ships commanded by a competent 
seaman. In those days the speed depended 
upon the seaman; therefore, apart from the 
laws, rules, and regulations for the good 
preservation of his cargo, he was careful of 
his loading, or what is technically called the 
trim of his ship. Some ships sailed fast on 
an even keel, others had to be trimmed 
quite one foot by the stern, and I have 
heard of a ship that gave her best speed on a 
wind when so loaded as to float a couple of 
inches by the head. 

I call to mind a winter landscape in Am- 
sterdam — a flat foreground of waste -land, 
with here and there stacks of timber, like 
the huts of a camp of some very miserable 
tribe; the long stretch of the Handelskade; 

78 



The Weight of the Burden 

cold, stone - faced quays, with the snow- 
sprinkled ground and the hard, frozen water 
of the canal, in which were set ships one be- 
hind another with their frosty mooring- 
ropes hanging slack and their decks idle and 
deserted, because, as the master stevedore (a 
gentle, pale person, with a few golden hairs 
on his chin and a reddened nose) informed 
me, their cargoes were frozen in up-country 
on barges and schuyts. In the distance, be- 
yond the waste ground, and running parallel 
with the line of ships, a line of brown, warm- 
toned houses seemed bowed under snow- 
laden roofs. From afar at the end of Tsar 
Peter Straat, issued in the frosty air the 
tinkle of bells of the horse tram-cars, appear- 
ing and disappearing in the opening between 
the buildings, like little toy carriages har- 
nessed with toy horses and played with by 
people that appeared no bigger than children. 
I was, as the French say, biting my fists 
with impatience for that cargo frozen up- 
country; with rage at that canal set fast, at 
the wintry and deserted aspect of all those 
ships that seemed to decay in grim depres- 
sion for want of the open water. I was chief 

79 



The Mirror of the Sea 

mate, and very much alone. Directly I had 
joined I received from my owners instruc- 
tions to send all the ship's apprentices away 
on leave together, because in such weather 
there was nothing for anybody to do, unless 
to keep up a fire in the cabin stove. That 
was attended to by a snuffy and mop-headed, 
inconceivably dirty, and weirdly toothless 
Dutch ship-keeper, who could hardly speak 
three words of English, but who must have 
had some considerable knowledge of the 
language, since he managed invariably to 
interpret in the contrary sense everything 
that was said to him. 

Notwithstanding the little iron stove, the 
ink froze on the swing-table in the cabin, 
and I found it more convenient to go ashore 
stumbling over the arctic waste-land and 
shivering in glazed tram - cars in order to 
write my evening letter to my owners in a 
gorgeous cafe in the centre of the town. It 
was an immense place, lofty and gilt, up- 
holstered in red plush, full of electric lights, 
and so thoroughly warmed that even the 
marble tables felt tepid to the touch. The 
waiter who brought me my cup of coffee 

80 



The Weight of the Burden 

bore, by comparison with my utter isola- 
tion, the dear aspect of an intimate friend. 
There, alone in a noisy crowd, I would write 
slowly a letter addressed to Glasgow, of 
which the gist would be: There is no cargo, 
and no prospect of any coming till late 
spring apparently. And all the time I sat 
there the necessity of getting back to the 
ship bore heavily on my already half-con- 
gealed spirits — the shivering in glazed tram- 
cars, the stumbling over the snow-sprinkled 
waste ground, the vision of ships frozen in a 
row, appearing vaguely like corpses of black 
vessels in a white world, so silent, so lifeless, 
so soulless they seemed to be. 

With precaution I would go up the side of 
my own particular corpse, and would feel 
her as cold as ice itself and as slippery under 
my feet. My cold berth would swallow up 
like a chilly burial niche my bodily shivers 
and my mental excitement. It was a cruel 
winter. The very air seemed as hard and 
trenchant as steel; but it would have taken 
much more than this to extinguish my 
sacred fire for the exercise of my craft. No 
young man of twenty-four appointed chief 



The Mirror of the Sea 

mate for the first time in his life would have 
let that Dutch tenacious winter penetrate 
into his heart. I think that in those days I 
never forgot the fact of my elevation for five 
consecutive minutes. I fancy it kept me 
warm, even in my slumbers, better than the 
high pile of blankets, which positively 
crackled with frost as I threw them off in 
the morning. And I would get up early for 
no reason whatever except that I was in sole 
charge. The new captain had not been ap- 
pointed yet. 

Almost each morning a letter from my 
owners would arrive, directing me to go to 
the charterers and clamor for the ship's 
cargo; to threaten them with the heaviest 
penalties of demurrage; to demand that this 
assortment of varied merchandise, set fast 
in a landscape of ice and windmills some- 
where up-country, should be put on rail in- 
stantly, and fed up to the ship in regular 
quantities every day. After drinking some 
hot coffee, like an arctic explorer setting off 
on a sledge journey towards the north pole, 
I would go ashore and roll shivering in a 
tram-car into the very heart of the town, 

82 



The Weight of the Burden 

past clean-faced houses, past thousands of 
brass knockers upon a thousand painted 
doors glimmering behind rows of trees of 
the pavement species, leafless, gaunt, seem- 
ingly dead forever. 

That part of the expedition was easy- 
enough, though the horses were painfully 
glistening with icicles, and the aspect of the 
tram-conductors' faces presented a repulsive 
blending of crimson and purple. But as to 
frightening or bullying, or even wheedling 
some sort of answer out of Mr. Hudig, that 
was another matter altogether. He was a 
big, swarthy Netherlander, with black mus- 
tache and a bold glance. He always began 
by shoving me into a chair before I had time 
to open my mouth, gave me cordially a large 
cigar, and in excellent English would start 
to talk everlastingly about the phenomenal 
severity of the weather, It was impossible 
to threaten a man who, though he possessed 
the language perfectly, seemed incapable of 
understanding any phrase pronounced in a 
tone of remonstrance or discontent. As to 
quarrelling with him, it would have been 
stupid. The weather was too bitter for 

83 



The Mirror of the Sea 

that. His office was so warm, his fire so 
bright, his sides shook so heartily with 
laughter, that I experienced always a great 
difficulty in making up my mind to reach 
for my hat. 

At last the cargo did come. At first it 
came dribbling in by rail in trucks, till the 
thaw set in; and then fast, in a multitude of 
barges, with a great rush of unbound waters. 
The gentle master stevedore had his hands 
very full at last ; and the chief mate became 
worried in his mind as to the proper dis- 
tribution of the weight of his first cargo 
in a ship he did not personally know be- 
fore. 

Ships do want humoring. They want 
humoring in handling; and if you mean to 
handle them well, they must have been 
humored in the distribution of the weight 
which you ask them to carry through the 
good and evil fortune of a passage. Your 
ship is a tender creature, whose idiosyn- 
crasies must be attended to if you mean her 
to come, with credit to herself and you, 
through the rough-and-tumble of her life. 



The Weight of the Burden 

So seemed to think the new captain, who 
arrived the day after we had finished load- 
ing, on the very eve of the day of sailing. I 
first beheld him on the quay, a complete 
stranger to me, obviously not a Hollander, 
in a black bowler and a short, drab over- 
coat, ridiculously out of tone with the winter 
aspect of the waste-lands, bordered by the 
brown fronts of houses with their roofs drip- 
ping with melting snow. 

This stranger was walking up and down, 
absorbed in the marked contemplation of 
the ship's fore-and-aft trim; but when I saw 
him squat on his heels in the slush at the 
very edge of the quay to peer at the draught 
of water under her counter, I said to myself, 
''This is the captain." And presently I 
descried his luggage coming along — a real 
sailor's chest, carried by means of rope- 
beckets between two men, with a couple of 
leather portmanteaus and a roll of charts 
sheeted in canvas piled upon the lid. The 
sudden, spontaneous agility with which he 
bounded aboard right off the rail afforded 
me the first glimpse of his real character. 
Without further preliminaries than a friend- 

85 



The Mirror of the Sea 

ly nod, he addressed me: " You have got her 
pretty well in her fore-and-aft trim. Now 
what about your weights?" 

I told him I had managed to keep the 
weight sufficiently well up, as I thought, 
one-third of the whole being in the upper 
part "above the beams," as the technical 
expression has it. He whistled '"Phew!" 
scrutinizing me from head to foot. A sort 
of smiling vexation was visible on his ruddy 
face. 

"Well, we shall have a lively time of it 
this passage, I bet," he said. 

He knew. It turned out he had been 
chief mate of her for the two preceding voy- 
ages; and I was already familiar with his 
handwriting in the old log-books I had been 
perusing in my cabin with a natural curi- 
osity, looking up the records of my new 
ship's luck, of her behavior, of the good 
times she had had, and of the troubles she 
had escaped. 

He was right in his prophecy. On our 
passage from Amsterdam to Samarang with 
a general cargo, of which, alas! only one- 
third in weight was stowed "above the 

86 



The Weight of the Burden 

beams," we had a lively time of it. It was 
lively, but not joyful. There was not even 
a single moment of comfort in it, because no 
seaman can feel comfortable in body or 
mind when he has made his ship uneasy. 

To travel along with a cranky ship for 
ninety days or so is no doubt a nerve-trying 
experience ; but in this case what was wrong 
with our craft was this: that by my system 
of loading she had been made much too 
stable. 

Neither before nor since have I felt a ship 
roll so abruptly, so violently, so heavily. 
Once she began, you felt that she would 
never stop, and this hopeless sensation char- 
acterizing the motion of ships whose centre 
of gravity is brought down too low in load- 
ing made every one on board weary of keep- 
ing on his feet. I remember once overhear- 
ing one of the hands say: "By Heavens, 
Jack! I feel as if I didn't mind how soon I 
let myself go, and let the blamed hooker 
knock my brains out if she likes." The 
captain used to remark, frequently: "Ah, 
yes ; I dare say one - third weight above 
beams would have been quite enough for 

87 



The Mirror of the Sea 

most ships. But then, you see, there's no 
two of them alike on the seas, and she's an 
uncommonly ticklish jade to load." 

Down south, running before the gales of 
high latitudes, she made our life a burden 
to us. There were days when nothing 
would keep even on the swing-tables, when 
there was no position where you could fix 
yourself so as not to feel a constant strain 
upon all the muscles of your body. She 
rolled and rolled with an awful dislodging 
jerk and that dizzily fast sweep of her masts 
on every swing. It was a wonder that the 
men sent aloft were not flung off the yards, 
the yards not flung off the masts, the masts 
not flung overboard. The captain in his 
arm-chair, holding on grimly at the head of 
the table, with the soup -tureen rolling on 
one side of the cabin and the steward 
sprawling on the other, would observe, look- 
ing at me: " That's your one-third above the 
beams. The only thing that surprises me is 
that the sticks have stuck to her all this 
time." 

Ultimately some of the minor spars did go 
— nothing important : spanker - booms and 

88 



The Weight of the Burden 

such like — because at times the frightful 
impetus of her rolling would part a fourfold 
tackle of new three-inch Manila-line as if it 
were weaker than pack-thread. 

It was only poetic justice that the chief 
mate, who had made a mistake — perhaps a 
half excusable one — about the distribution 
of his ship's cargo, should pay the penalty. 
A piece of one of the minor spars that did 
carry away flew against the chief mate's 
back, and sent him sliding on his face for 
quite a considerable distance along the 
main - deck. Thereupon followed various 
and unpleasant consequences of a physical 
order — "queer symptoms," as the captain, 
who treated them, used to say; inexplicable 
periods of powerlessness, sudden accesses of 
mysterious pain; and the patient agreed 
fully with the regretful mutters of his very 
attentive captain wishing that it had been 
a straightforward broken leg. Even the 
Dutch doctor who took the case up in 
Samarang offered no scientific explanation. 
All he said, was: "Ah, friend, you are young 
yet; it may be very serious for your whole 
life. You must leave your ship; you must 

89 



The Mirror of the Sea 

quite silent be for three months — quite 
silent." 

Of course, he meant the chief mate to 
keep quiet— to lay up, as a matter of fact. 
His manner was impressive enough, if his 
English was childishly imperfect when com- 
pared with the fluency of Mr. Hudig, the 
figure at the other end of that passage, and 
memorable enough in its way. In a great, 
airy ward of a Far Eastern hospital, lying 
on my back, I had plenty of leisure to re- 
member the dreadful cold and snow of Am- 
sterdam, while looking at the fronds of the 
palm-trees tossing and rustling at the height 
of the window. I could remember the 
elated feeling and the soul-gripping cold of 
those tram-way journeys taken into town to 
put what in diplomatic language is called 
pressure upon the good Hudig, with his 
warm fire, his arm-chair, his big cigar, and 
the never-failing suggestion in his good- 
natured voice: "I suppose in the end it is 
you they will appoint captain before the 
ship sails?" It may have been his extreme 
good - nature, the serious, unsmiling good- 
nature of a fat, swarthy man with coal- 

90 



The Weight of the Burden 

black mustache and steady eyes; but he 
might have been a bit of a diplomatist, too. 
His enticing suggestions I used to repel 
modestly by the assurance that it was ex- 
tremely unlikely, as I had not enough ex- 
perience. "You know very well how to go 
about business matters," he used to say, 
with a sort of affected moodiness clouding 
his serene, round face. I wonder whether he 
ever laughed to himself after I had left the 
office. I dare say he never did, because I 
understand that diplomatists, in and out of 
the career, take themselves and their tricks 
with an exemplary seriousness. 

But he had nearly persuaded me that I 
was fit in every way to be trusted with a 
command. There came three months of 
mental worry, hard rolling, remorse, and 
physical pain to drive home the lesson of in- 
sufficient experience. 

Yes, your ship wants to be humored with 
knowledge. You must treat with an un- 
derstanding consideration the mysteries of 
her feminine nature, and then she will stand 
by you faithfully in the unceasing struggle 
with forces wherein defeat is no shame. It 
7 9 1 



The Mirror of the Sea 

is a serious relation, that in which a man 
stands to his ship. She has her rights as 
though she could breathe and speak; and, 
indeed, there are ships that, for the right 
man, will do anything but speak, as the say- 
ing goes. 

A ship is not a slave. You must make 
her easy in a sea-way, you must never forget 
that you owe her the fullest share of your 
thought, of your skill, of your self-love. If 
you remember that obligation, naturally 
and without effort, as if it were an instinc- 
tive feeling of your inner life, she will sail, 
stay, run for you as long as she is able, or, 
like a sea-bird going to rest upon the angry 
waves, she will lay out the heaviest gale that 
ever made you doubt living long enough to 
see another sunrise. 




Overdue and Missing 



gfFTEN I turn with melancholy 
eagerness to the space reserved 
in the newspapers under the 
general heading of "Shipping 
fM^M^I^^ Intelligence." I meet there the 
names of ships I have known. Every year 
some of these names disappear — the names 
of old friends. Tempi passati ! 

The different divisions of that kind of 
news are set down in their order, which 
varies but slightly in its arrangement of 
concise head-lines. And first comes " Speak- 
ings ' ' — reports of ships met and signalled at 
sea, name, port, where from, where bound 
for, so many days out, ending frequently with 
the words "All well." Then come "Wrecks 
and Casualties" — a longish array of para- 
graphs, unless the weather has been fair and 
clear, and friendly to ships all over the world. 

93 



The Mirror of the Sea 

On some days there appears the heading 
"Overdue" — an ominous threat of loss and 
sorrow trembling yet in the balance of fate. 
There is something sinister to a seaman in the 
very grouping of the letters which form this 
word, clear in its meaning, and seldom 
threatening in vain. 

Only a very few days more — appallingly 
few to the hearts which had set themselves 
bravely to hope against hope — three weeks, 
a month later, perhaps, the name of ships 
under the blight of the "Overdue" heading 
shall appear again in the column of "Ship- 
ping Intelligence," but under the final dec- 
laration of "Missing." 

"The ship (or bark, or brig) so-and-so, 
bound from such a port, with such and such 
cargo, for such another port, having left at 
such and such a date, last spoken at sea on 
such a day, and never having been heard of 
since, was posted to-day as missing." Such 
in its strictly official eloquence is the form 
of funeral orations on ships that, perhaps 
wearied with a long struggle, or in some un- 
guarded moment that may come to the 
readiest of us, had let themselves be over- 

94 



Overdue and Missing 

whelmed by a sudden blow from the en- 
emy. 

Who can say? Perhaps the men she car- 
ried had asked her to do too much, had 
stretched beyond breaking-point the endur- 
ing faithfulness which seems wrought and 
hammered into that assemblage of iron ribs 
and plating, of wood and steel and canvas 
and wire, which goes to the making of a ship 
— a complete creation endowed with char- 
acter, individuality, qualities and defects, 
by men whose hands launch her upon the 
water, and that other men shall learn to 
know with an intimacy surpassing the in- 
timacy of man with man, to love with a love 
nearly as great as that of man for woman, 
and often as blind in its infatuated disre- 
gard of defects. 

There are ships which bear a bad name, 
but I have yet to meet one whose crew for 
the time being failed to stand up angrily for 
her against every criticism. One ship which 
I call to mind now had the reputation of 
killing somebody every voyage she made. 
This was no calumny, and yet I remember 
well, somewhere far back in the late seven- 

95 



The Mirror of the Sea 

ties, that the crew of that ship were, if any- 
thing, rather proud of her evil fame, as if 
they had been an utterly corrupt lot of 
desperadoes glorying in their association 
with an atrocious creature. We, belonging 
to other vessels moored all about the Circular 
Quay in Sydney, used to shake our heads at 
her with a great sense of the unblemished 
virtue of our own well-loved ships. 

I shall not pronounce her name. She is 
" missing" now, after a sinister, but, from 
the point of view of her owners, a useful 
career extending over many years, and, I 
should say, across every ocean of our globe. 
Having killed a man for every voyage, and 
perhaps rendered more misanthropic by the 
infirmities that come with years upon a ship, 
she had made up her mind to kill all hands 
at once before leaving the scene of her ex- 
ploits. A fitting end, this, to a life of use- 
fulness and crime — in a last outburst of an 
evil passion supremely satisfied on some 
wild night, perhaps, to the applauding 
clamor of wind and wave. 

How did she do it? In the word " miss- 
ing" there is a horrible depth of doubt and 

96 



Overdue and Missing 

speculation. Did she go quickly from under 
the men's feet, or did she resist to the end, 
letting the sea batter her to pieces, start her 
butts, wrench her frame, load her with an 
increasing weight of salt - water, and, dis- 
masted, unmanageable, rolling heavily, her 
boats gone, her decks swept, had she wearied 
her men half to death with the unceasing 
labor at the pumps before she sank with 
them like a stone? 

However, such a case must be rare. I 
imagine a raft of some sort could always be 
contrived; and, even if it saved no one, it 
would float on and be picked up, perhaps 
conveying some hint of the vanished name. 
Then that ship would not be, properly 
speaking, missing. She would be "lost with 
all hands," and in that distinction there is a 
subtle difference — less horror and a less ap- 
palling darkness. 



The unholy fascination of dread dwells in 
the thought of the last moments of a ship 
reported as "missing" in the columns of the 

97 



The Mirror of the Sea 

Shipping Gazette. Nothing of her ever comes 
to light — no grating, no life-buoy, no piece 
of boat or branded oar — to give a hint of 
the place and date of her sudden end. The 
Shipping Gazette does not even call her "lost 
with all hands." She remains simply "miss- 
ing"; she has disappeared enigmatically into 
a mystery of fate as big as the world, where 
your imagination of a brother-sailor, of a 
fellow-servant and lover of ships, may 
range unchecked. 

And yet sometimes one gets a hint of 
what the last scene may be like in the life of 
a ship and her crew, which resembles a 
drama in its struggle against a great force 
bearing it up, formless, ungraspable, chaotic 
and mysterious as fate. 

It was on a gray afternoon in the lull of a 
three days' gale that had left the Southern 
Ocean tumbling heavily upon our ship, un- 
der a sky hung with rags of clouds that 
seemed to have been cut and hacked by the 
keen edge of a sou 'west gale. 

Our craft, a Clyde-built bark of one thou- 
sand tons, rolled so heavily that something 
aloft had carried away. No matter what the 

98 



Overdue and Missing 

damage was, but it was serious enough to 
induce me to go aloft myself with a couple 
of hands and the carpenter to see the tem- 
porary repairs properly done. 

Sometimes we had to drop everything and 
cling with both hands to the swaying spars, 
holding our breath in fear of a terribly 
heavy roll. And, wallowing as if she meant 
to turn over with us, the bark, her decks 
full of water, her gear flying in bights, ran 
at some ten knots an hour. We had been 
driven far south — much farther that way 
than we had meant to go; and suddenly, up 
there in the slings of the foreyard, in the 
midst of our work, I felt my shoulder 
gripped with such force in the carpenter's 
powerful paw that I positively yelled with 
unexpected pain. The man's eyes stared 
close in my face, and he shouted. "Look, 
sir! look! What's this?" pointing ahead 
with his other hand. 

At first I saw nothing. The sea was one 
empty wilderness of black-and-white hills. 
Suddenly, half concealed in the tumult of 
the foaming rollers I made out awash, 
something enormous, rising and falling — 

L.0FC. 99 



The Mirror of the Sea 

something spread out like a burst of foam, 
but with a more bluish, more solid look. 

It was a piece of an ice-floe melted down 
to a fragment, but still big enough to sink a 
ship, and floating lower than any raft, right 
in our way, as if ambushed among the waves 
with murderous intent. There was no time 
to get down on deck. I shouted from aloft 
till my head was ready to split. I was 
heard aft, and we managed to clear the 
sunken floe which had come all the way 
from the southern ice-cap to have a try at 
our unsuspecting lives. Had it been an 
hour later, nothing could have saved the 
ship, for no eye could have made out in the 
dusk that pale piece of ice swept over by 
the white-crested waves. 

And as we stood near the taffrail side by 
side, my captain and I, looking at it, hardly 
discernible already, but still quite close-to 
on our quarter, he remarked in a meditative 
tone: 

" But for the turn of that wheel just in 
time there would have been another case of 
a 'missing' ship." 

Nobody ever comes back from a "miss- 

ioo 



Overdue and Missing 

ing" ship to tell how hard was the death of 
the craft, and how sudden and overwhelm- 
ing the last anguish of her men. Nobody 
can say with what thoughts, with what re- 
grets, with what words on their lips they 
died. But there is something fine in the 
sudden passing away of these hearts from 
the extremity of struggle and stress and tre- 
mendous uproar — from the vast, unrestful 
rage of the surface to the profound peace of 
the depths, sleeping untroubled since the 
beginning of ages. 



But if the word "missing" brings all hope 
to an end and settles the loss of the under- 
writers, the word "overdue" confirms the 
fears already born in many homes ashore, 
and opens the door of speculation in the 
market of risks. 

Maritime risks, be it understood. There 
is a class of optimists ready to reinsure an 
"overdue" ship at a heavy premium. But 
nothing can insure the hearts on shore against 
the bitterness of waiting for the worst. 

IOI 



The Mirror of the Sea 

For if a " missing' ' ship has never turned 
up within the memory of seamen of my gen- 
eration, the name of an ''overdue" ship, 
trembling as it were on the edge of the fatal 
heading, has been known to appear as " ar- 
rived." 

It must blaze up, indeed, with a great 
brilliance the dull, printers' ink expended on 
the assemblage of the few letters that form 
the ship's name to the anxious eyes scanning 
the page in fear and trembling. It is like 
the message of reprieve from the sentence 
of sorrow suspended over many a home, 
even if some of the men in her have been 
the most homeless mortals that you may 
find among the wanderers of the sea. 

The reinsurer, the optimist of ill-luck and 
disaster, slaps his pocket with satisfaction. 
The underwriter, who had been trying to 
minimize the amount of impending loss, re- 
grets his premature pessimism. The ship 
has been stancher, the skies more merciful, 
the seas less angry, or perhaps the men on 
board of a finer temper than he has been 
willing to take for granted. 

"The ship So-and-so, bound to such a 

102 



Overdue and Missing 

port, and posted as 'overdue,' was reported 
yesterday as having arrived safely at her 
destination." 

Thus run the official words of the reprieve 
addressed to the hearts ashore lying under 
a heavy sentence. And they come swiftly 
from the other side of the earth, over wires 
and cables, for your electric telegraph is 
a great alleviator of anxiety. Details, of 
course, shall follow. And they may unfold 
a tale of narrow escape, of steady ill-luck, of 
high winds and heavy weather, of ice, of in- 
terminable calms or endless head -gales; a 
tale of difficulties overcome, of adversity de- 
fied by a small knot of men upon the great 
loneliness of the sea; a tale of resource, of 
courage — of helplessness, perhaps. 

Of all ships disabled at sea, a steamer who 
has lost her propeller is the most helpless. 
And if she drifts into an unpopulated part 
of the ocean she may soon become overdue. 
The menace of the "overdue" and the 
finality of " missing" come very quickly to 
steamers whose life, fed on coals and breath- 
ing the black breath of smoke into the air, 
goes on in disregard of wind and wave. 

103 



The Mirror of the Sea 

Such a one, a big steamship, too, whose 
working life had been a record of faithful 
keeping time from land to land, in disregard 
of wind and sea, once lost her propeller 
down south, on her passage out to New 
Zealand. 

It was the wintry, murky time of cold 
gales and heavy seas. With the snapping 
of her tail-shaft her life seemed suddenly to 
depart from her big body, and from a stub- 
born, arrogant existence she passed all at 
once into the passive state of a drifting log. 
A ship sick with her own weakness has not 
the pathos of a ship vanquished in a battle 
with the elements, wherein consists the inner 
drama of her life. No seaman can look 
without compassion upon a disabled ship, 
but to look at a sailing-vessel with her lofty 
spars gone is to look upon a defeated but in- 
domitable warrior. There is defiance in the 
remaining stumps of her masts, raised up 
like maimed limbs against the menacing 
scowl of a stormy sky; there is high courage 
in the upward sweep of her lines towards 
the bow; and as soon as, on a hastily rigged 
spar, a strip of canvas is shown to the wind 

104 



Overdue and Missing 

to keep her head to sea, she faces the waves 
again with an unsubdued courage. 



The efficiency of a steamship consists not 
so much in her courage as in the power she 
carries within herself. It beats and throbs 
like a pulsating heart within her iron ribs, 
and when it stops, the steamer, whose life is 
not so much a contest as the disdainful ig- 
noring of the sea, sickens and dies upon the 
waves. The sailing-ship, with her unthrob- 
bing body, seemed to lead mysteriously a 
sort of unearthly existence, bordering upon 
the magic of the invisible forces, sustained 
by the inspiration of life-giving and death- 
dealing winds. 

So that big steamer, dying by a sudden 
stroke, drifted, an unwieldy corpse, away 
from the track of other ships. And she 
would have been posted really as " overdue," 
or maybe as "missing," had she not been 
sighted in a snow-storm, vaguely, like a 
strange, rolling island, by a whaler going 
north from her polar cruising - ground. 

105 



The Mirror of the Sea 

There was plenty of food on board, and I 
don't know whether the nerves of her pas- 
sengers were at all affected by anything else 
than the sense of interminable boredom or 
the vague fear of that unusual situation. 
Does a passenger ever feel the life of the 
ship in which he is being carried like a sort 
of honored bale of highly sensitive goods? 
For a man who has never been a passenger 
it is impossible to say. But I know that 
there is no harder trial for a seaman than to 
feel a dead ship under his feet. 

There is no mistaking that sensation, so 
dismal, so tormenting and so subtle, so full 
of unhappiness and unrest. I could im- 
agine no worse eternal punishment for evil 
seamen who die unrepentant upon the 
earthly sea than that their souls should be 
condemned to man the ghosts of disabled 
ships, drifting forever across a ghostly and 
tempestuous ocean. 

She must have looked ghostly enough, 
that broken-down steamer, rolling in that 
snow-storm — a dark apparition in a world 
of white snow-flakes to the staring eyes of 
that whaler's crew. Evidently they didn't 

106 



Overdue and Missing 

believe in ghosts, for on arrival into port 
her captain unromantically reported having 
sighted a disabled steamer in latitude some- 
where about 50 S. and a longitude still 
more uncertain. Other steamers came out 
to look for her, and ultimately towed her 
away from the cold edge of the world into a 
harbor with docks and work-shops, where, 
with many blows of hammers, her pulsating 
heart of steel was set going again to go forth 
presently in the renewed pride of its strength, 
fed on fire and water, breathing black 
smoke into the air, pulsating, throbbing, 
shouldering its arrogant way against the 
great rollers in blind disdain of winds and 
sea. 

The track she had made when drifting 
while her heart stood still within her iron 
ribs looked like a tangled thread on the 
white paper of the chart. It was shown to 
me by a friend, her second officer. In that 
surprising tangle there were words in minute 
letters— "gales," "thick fog," "ice"— writ- 
ten by him here and there as memoranda of 
the weather. She had interminably turned 
upon her tracks, she had crossed and re- 
s 107 



The Mirror of the Sea 

crossed her hap-hazard path till it resembled 
nothing so much as a puzzling maze of pen- 
cilled lines without a meaning. But in that 
maze there lurked all the romance of the 
4 'overdue" and a menacing hint of "miss- 
ing." 

"We had three weeks of it," said my 
friend. "Just think of that!" 

"How do you feel about it?" I asked. 

He waved his hand as much as to say: 
It's all in the day's work. But then, ab- 
ruptly, as if making up his mind: 

"I'll tell you. Towards the last I used to 
shut myself up in my berth and cry." 

"Cry?" 

"Shed tears," he explained, briefly, and 
rolled up the chart. 

I can answer for it, he was a good man — 
as good as ever stepped upon a ship's deck — 
but he could not bear the feeling of a dead 
ship under his feet: the sickly, disheartening 
feeling which the men of some "overdue" 
ships that come into harbor at last under a 
jury-rig must have felt, combated, and over- 
come in the faithful discharge of their duty. 




The Grip of the Land 



(T is difficult for a seaman to be- 
lieve that his stranded ship 
does not feel as unhappy at 
the unnatural predicament of 
having no water under her 
keel as he is himself at feeling her stranded. 
Stranding is, indeed, the reverse of sink- 
ing. The sea does not close upon the 
water-logged hull with a sunny ripple, or 
maybe with the angry rush of a curling 
wave, erasing her name from the roll of liv- 
ing ships. No. It is as if an invisible hand 
had been stealthily uplifted from the bot- 
tom to catch hold of her keel as it glides 
through the water. 

More than any other event does "strand- 
ing" bring to the sailor a sense of utter and 
dismal failure. There are strandings and 
strandings, but I am safe to say that ninety 

109 



The Mirror of the Sea 

per cent, of them are occasions in which a 
sailor, without dishonor, may well wish him- 
self dead ; and I have no doubt that of those 
who had the experience of their ship taking 
the ground, ninety per cent, did actually for 
five seconds or so wish themselves dead. 

" Taking the ground" is the professional 
expression for a ship that is stranded in 
gentle circumstances. But the feeling is 
more as if the ground had taken hold of her. 
It is for those on her deck a surprising sen- 
sation. It is as if your feet had been 
caught in an imponderable snare; you feel 
the balance of your body threatened, and 
the steady poise of your mind is destroyed 
at once. This sensation lasts only a second, 
for even while you stagger something seems 
to turn over in your head, bringing upper- 
most the mental exclamation, full of aston- 
ishment and dismay, " By Jove! she's on the 
ground!" 

And that is very terrible. After all, the 
only mission of a seaman's calling is to keep 
ships' keels off the ground. Thus the mo- 
ment of her stranding takes away from him 
every excuse for his continued existence. 

no 



The Grip of the Land 

To keep ships afloat is his business; it is his 
trust; it is the effective formula of the bot- 
tom of all these vague impulses, dreams, and 
illusions that go to the making up of a boy's 
vocation. The grip of the land upon the 
keel of your ship, even if nothing worse 
comes of it than the wear and tear of tackle 
and the loss of time, remains in a seaman's 
memory, an indelibly fixed taste of disaster. 
" Stranded," within the meaning of this 
paper, stands for a more or less excusable 
mistake. A ship may be " driven ashore" 
by stress of weather. It is a catastrophe, a 
defeat. To be "run ashore" has the little- 
ness, poignancy, and bitterness of human 
error. 



That is why your "standings" are for 
the most part so unexpected. In fact, they 
are all unexpected, except those heralded by 
some short glimpse of the danger, full of agi- 
tation and excitement, like an awakening 
from a dream of incredible folly. 

The land suddenly at night looms up right 

in 



The Mirror of the Sea 

over your bows, or perhaps the cry of 
"Broken water ahead!" is raised, and some 
long mistake, some complicated edifice of 
self-delusion, over confidence, and wrong rea- 
soning is brought down in a fatal shock, and 
the heart-searing experience of your ship's 
keel scraping and scrunching over, say, a 
coral reef. It is a sound, for its size, far 
more terrific to your soul than that of a 
world coming violently to an end. But out 
of that chaos your belief in your own pru- 
dence and sagacity reasserts itself. You ask 
yourself, Where on earth did I get to? 
How on earth did I get there? with a con- 
viction that it could not be your own act, 
that there has been at work some mysteri- 
ous conspiracy of accident; that the charts 
are all wrong, and if the charts are not 
wrong, that land and. sea have changed their 
places ; that your misfortune shall forever re- 
main inexplicable, since you have lived al- 
ways with the sense of your trust, the last 
thing on closing your eyes, the first on open- 
ing them, as if your mind had kept firm 
hold of your responsibility during the hours 
of sleep. 

112 



The Grip of the Land 

You contemplate mentally your mis- 
chance, till little by little your mood changes, 
cold doubt steals into the very marrow of 
your bones, you see the inexplicable fact in 
another light. That is the time when you 
ask yourself, How on earth could I have 
been fool enough to get there? And you 
are ready to renounce all belief in your good 
sense, in your knowledge, in your fidelity, 
in what you thought till then was the best 
in you, giving you the daily bread of life and 
the moral support of other men's confidence. 

The ship is lost or not lost. Once strand- 
ed, you have to do your best by her. She 
may be saved by your efforts, by your re- 
source and fortitude bearing up against the 
heavy weight of guilt and failure. And 
there are justifiable strandings in fogs, 
on unchartered seas, on dangerous shores, 
through treacherous tides. But, saved or 
not saved, there remains with her com- 
mander a distinct sense of loss, a flavor in 
the mouth of the real, abiding danger that 
lurks in all the forms of human existence. 
It is an acquisition, too, that feeling. A 
man may be the better for it, but he will 

"3 



The Mirror of the Sea 

not be the same. Damocles has seen the 
sword suspended by a hair over his head, 
and though a good man need not be made 
less valuable by such a knowledge, the feast 
shall not henceforth have the same flavor. 

Years ago I was concerned as chief mate 
in a case of stranding which was not fatal to 
the ship. We went to work for ten hours 
on end, laying out anchors in readiness to 
heave off at high-water. While I was still 
busy about the decks forward I heard the 
steward at my elbow saying: "The captain 
asks whether you mean to come in, sir, and 
have something to eat to-day." 

I went into the cuddy. My captain sat 
at the head of the table like a statue. There 
was a strange motionlessness of everything 
in that pretty little cabin. The swing-table 
which for seventy odd days had been always 
on the move, if ever so little, hung quite still 
above the soup-tureen. Nothing could have 
altered the rich color of my commander's 
complexion, laid on generously by wind and 
sea; but between the two tufts of fair hair 
above his ears, his skull, generally suffused 
with the hue of blood, shone dead white, 

114 



The Grip of the Land 

like a dome of ivory. And he looked 
strangely untidy. I perceived he had not 
shaved himself that day ; and yet the wildest 
motion of the ship in the most stormy lati- 
tudes we had passed through, never made 
him miss one single morning ever since we 
left the Channel. The fact must be that a 
commander cannot possibly shave himself 
when his ship is aground. I have com- 
manded ships myself, but I don't know; I 
have never tried to shave in my life. 

He did not offer to help me or himself till 
I had coughed markedly several times. I 
talked to him professionally in a cheery 
tone, and ended with the confident asser- 
tion: 

"We shall get her off by midnight, sir. " 

He smiled faintly without looking up, and 
muttered as if to himself: 

"Yes, yes; the captain put the ship ashore 
and we got her off." 

Then, raising his head, he attacked grum- 
pily the steward, a lanky, anxious youth with 
a long, pale face and two big front teeth. 

"What makes this soup so bitter? I am 
surprised the mate can swallow the beastly 

"5 



The Mirror of the Sea 

stuff. I'm sure the cook's ladled some salt- 
water into it by mistake." 

The charge was so outrageous that the 
steward, for all answer, only dropped his eye- 
lids bashfully. 

There was nothing the matter with the 
soup. I had a second helping. My heart 
was warm with hours of hard work at the 
head of a willing crew. I was elated with 
having handled heavy anchors, cables, boats, 
without the slightest hitch; pleased with 
having laid out scientifically bower, stream, 
and kedge exactly where I believed they 
would do most good. On that occasion the 
bitter taste of a stranding was not for my 
mouth. That experience came later, and it 
was only then that I understood the loneli- 
ness of the man in charge. 

It's the captain who puts the ship ashore; 
it's we who get her off. 




The Character of the Foe 



'T seems to me that no man born 
and truthful to himself could 
declare that he ever saw the 
sea looking young as the earth 
looks young in spring. But 
some of us, regarding the ocean with under- 
standing and affection, have seen it looking 
old, as if the immemorial ages had been 
stirred up from the undisturbed bottom of 
ooze. For it is a gale of wind that makes 
the sea look old. 

From a distance of years, looking at the 
remembered aspects of the storms lived 
through, it is that impression which disen- 
gages itself clearly from the great body of 
impressions left by many years of intimate 
contact. 

If you would know the age of the earth, 
look upon the sea in a storm. The grayness 

117 



The Mirror of the Sea 

of the whole immense surface, the wind fur- 
rows upon the faces of the waves, the great 
masses of foam, tossed about and waving 
like matted white locks, give to the sea in a 
gale an appearance of hoary age, lustreless, 
dull, without gleams, as though it had been 
created before light itself. 

Looking back after much love and much 
trouble, the instinct of primitive man, who 
seeks to personify the forces of Nature for 
his affection and for his fear, is awakened 
again in the breast of one civilized beyond 
that stage even in his infancy. One seems 
to have known gales as enemies, and even as 
enemies one embraces them in that affection- 
ate regret which clings to the past. 

Gales have their personalities, and, after 
all, perhaps it is not strange ; for, when all is 
said and done, they are adversaries whose 
wiles you must defeat, whose violence you 
must resist, and yet with whom you must 
live in the intimacies of nights and days. 

Here speaks the man of masts and sails, 
to whom the sea is not a navigable element, 
but an intimate companion. The length of 
passages, the growing sense of solitude, the 

118 



The Character of the Foe 

close dependence upon the very forces that, 
friendly to-day, without changing their nat- 
ure, by the mere putting forth of their 
might, become dangerous to-morrow, make 
for that sense of fellowship which modern 
seamen, good men as they are, cannot hope 
to know. And, besides, your modern ship, 
which is a steamship, makes her passages on 
other principles than yielding to the weather 
and humoring the sea. She receives smash- 
ing blows, but she advances; it is a slogging 
fight, and not a scientific campaign. The 
machinery, the steel, the fire, the steam 
have stepped in between the man and the 
sea. A modern fleet of ships does not so 
much make use of the sea as exploit a high- 
way. The modern ship is not the sport of 
the waves. Let us say that each of her 
voyages is a triumphant progress ; and yet it 
is a question whether it is not a more subtle 
and more human triumph to be the sport of 
the waves and yet survive, achieving your 
end. 

In his own time a man is always very 
modern. Whether the seamen of three hun- 
dred years hence will have the faculty of 

119 



The Mirror of the Sea 

sympathy it is impossible to say. An in- 
corrigible mankind hardens its heart in the 
progress of its own perfectability. How will 
they feel on seeing the illustrations to the 
sea novels of our day, or of our yesterday? 
It is impossible to guess. But the seaman 
of the last generation, brought into sym- 
pathy with the caravels of ancient time by 
his sailing-ship, their lineal descendant, can- 
not look upon those lumbering forms navi- 
gating the naive seas of ancient wood-cuts 
without a feeling of surprise, of affectionate 
derision, envy, and admiration. For those 
things, whose unmanageableness, even when 
represented on paper, makes one gasp with a 
sort of amused horror, were manned by men 
who are his direct professional ancestors. 

No; the seamen of three hundred years 
hence will probably be neither touched nor 
moved to derision, affection, or admiration. 
They will glance at the photogravures of our 
nearly defunct sailing-ships with a cold, in- 
quisitive, and indifferent eye. Our ships of 
yesterday will stand to their ships as no 
lineal ancestors, but as mere predecessors 
whose course will have been run and the 

120 



The Character of the Foe 

race extinct. Whatever craft he handles at 
sea, the seaman of the future shall be, not 
our descendant, but only our successor. 



And so much depends upon the craft 
which, made by man, is one with man, that 
the sea shall wear for him another aspect. 
I remember once seeing the commander — 
officially the master, by courtesy the cap- 
tain — of a fine iron ship of the old wool fleet 
shaking his head at a very pretty brigantine. 
She was bound the other way. She was a 
taut, trim, neat little craft, extremely well 
kept; and on that serene evening when we 
passed her close she looked the embodiment 
of coquettish comfort on the sea. It was 
somewhere near the Cape — The Cape being, 
of course, the Cape of Good Hope, the Cape 
of Storms of its Portuguese discoverer. And 
whether it is that the word " storm" should 
not be pronounced upon the sea where the 
storms dwell thickly, or because men are shy 
of confessing their good hopes, it has become 
the nameless cape — the Cape tout court. The 

121 



The Mirror of the Sea 

other great cape of the world, strangely- 
enough, is seldom if ever called a cape. We 
say, "a voyage round the Horn"; "we 
rounded the Horn"; "we got a frightful 
battering off the Horn ' ' ; but rarely ' ' Cape 
Horn," and, indeed, with some reason, for 
Cape Horn is as much an island as a cape. 
The third stormy cape of the world, which 
is the Leeuwin, receives generally its full 
name, as if to console its second-rate dig- 
nity. These are the capes that look upon 
the gales. 

The little brigantine, then, had doubled 
the Cape. Perhaps she was coming from 
Port Elizabeth, from East London — who 
knows? It was many years ago, but I re- 
member well the captain of the wool clipper 
nodding at her with the words, ' ' Fancy hav- 
ing to go about the sea in a thing like that!" 

He was a man brought up in big, deep- 
water ships, and the size of the craft under 
his feet was a part of his conception of the 
sea. His own ship was certainly big as 
ships went then. He may have thought of 
the size of his cabin, or — unconsciously, per- 
haps — have conjured up a vision of a vessel 

122 



The Character of the Foe 

so small tossing among the great seas. I 
didn't inquire, and to a young second mate 
the captain of the little, pretty brigantine, 
sitting astride a camp-stool with his chin 
resting on his hands that were crossed upon 
the rail, might have appeared a minor king 
among men. We passed her within ear-shot, 
without a hail, reading each other's name 
with the naked eye. 

Some years later, the second mate, the re- 
cipient of that almost involuntary mutter, 
could have told his captain that a man 
brought up in big ships may yet take a pe- 
culiar delight in what we should both then 
have called a small craft. Probably the 
captain of the big ship would not have un- 
derstood very well. His answer would have 
been a gruff, "Give me size," as I heard an- 
other man reply to a remark praising the 
handiness of a small vessel. It was not a 
love of the grandiose or the prestige attached 
to the command of great tonnage, for he 
continued, with an air of disgust and con- 
tempt, "Why, you get flung out of your 
bunk as likely as not in any sort of heavy 
weather." 

9 123 



The Mirror of the Sea 

I don't know. I remember a few nights 
in my lifetime, and in a big ship, too (as big 
as they made them then), when one did not 
get flung out of one's bed simply because one 
never even attempted to get in; one had 
been made too weary, too hopeless, to try. 
The expedient of turning your bedding out 
on to a damp floor and lying on it there was 
no earthly good, since you could not keep 
your place or get a second's rest in that or 
any other position. But of the delight of 
seeing a small craft run bravely among the 
great seas there can be no question to him 
whose soul does not dwell ashore. Thus I 
well remember a three days' run got out of 
a little bark of four hundred tons some- 
where between the islands of St. Paul and 
Amsterdam and Cape Otway on the Austra- 
lian coast. It was a hard, long gale, gray 
clouds and green sea, heavy weather un- 
doubtedly, but still what a sailor would call 
manageable. Under two lower topsails and 
a reefed foresail the bark seemed to race 
with a long, steady sea that did not becalm 
her in the troughs. The solemn thundering 
combers caught her up from astern, passed 

124 



The Character of the Foe 

her with a fierce boiling up of foam level 
with the bulwarks, swept on ahead with a 
swish and a roar: and the little vessel, dip- 
ping her jib-boom into the tumbling froth, 
would go on running in a smooth, glassy hol- 
low, a deep valley between two ridges of the 
sea, hiding the horizon ahead and. astern. 
There was such fascination in her pluck, 
nimbleness, the continual exhibition of un- 
failing sea -worthiness, in the semblance of 
courage and endurance, that I could not 
give up the delight of watching her run 
through the three unforgettable days of 
that gale which my mate also delighted to 
extol as "a famous shove." 

And this is one of those gales whose 
memory in after years returns, welcome in 
dignified austerity, as you remember with 
pleasure the noble features of a stranger 
with whom you have crossed swords once 
in knightly encounter and are never to see 
again. In this way gales have their physi- 
ognomy. You remember them by your 
own feelings, and no two gales stamp them- 
selves in the same way upon your emotions. 
Some cling to you in woe-begone misery; 

I2 5 



The Mirror of the Sea 

others come back fiercely and weirdly, like 
ghouls bent upon sucking your strength 
away; others, again, have a catastrophic 
splendor; some are unvenerated recollec- 
tions, as of spiteful wild -cats clawing at 
your agonized vitals; others are severe, like 
a visitation; and one or two rise up draped 
and mysterious, with an aspect of ominous 
menace. In each of them there is a char- 
acteristic point at which the whole feeling 
seems contained in one single moment. 
Thus there is a certain four o'clock in the 
morning in the confused roar of a black-and- 
white world when coming on deck to take 
charge of my watch I received the instan- 
taneous impression that the ship could not 
live for another hour in such a raging sea. 

I wonder what became of the men who 
silently (you couldn't hear yourself speak) 
must have shared that conviction with me. 
To be left to write about it is not, perhaps, 
the most enviable fate ; but the point is that 
this impression resumes in its intensity the 
whole recollection of days and days of des- 
perately dangerous weather. We were then, 
for reasons which it is not worth while to 

126 



The Character of the Foe 

specify, in the close neighborhood of Ker- 
guelen Land ; and now, when I open an atlas 
and look at the tiny dots on the map of the 
Southern Ocean, I see, as if engraved upon 
the paper, the enraged physiognomy of that 
gale. 

Another, strangely, recalls a silent man. 
And yet it was not din that was wanting; in 
fact, it was terrific. That one was a gale 
that came upon the ship swiftly, like a 
pampero, which last is a very sudden wind 
indeed. Before we knew very well what 
was coming all the sails we had set had 
burst; the furled ones were blowing loose, 
ropes flying, sea hissing — it hissed tremen- 
dously — wind howling, and the ship lying 
on her side, so that half of the crew were 
swimming and the other half clawing des- 
perately at whatever came to hand, accord- 
ing to the side of the deck each man had 
been caught on by the catastrophe, either to 
leeward or to windward. The shouting I 
need not mention — it was the merest drop 
in an ocean of noise — and yet the character 
of the gale seems contained in the recollec- 
tion of one small, not particularly impres- 

127 



The Mirror of the Sea 

sive, sallow man without a cap and with a 
very still face. Captain Jones — let us call 
him Jones — had been caught unawares. 
Two orders he had given at the first sign of 
an utterly unforeseen onset; after that the 
magnitude of his mistake seemed to have 
overwhelmed him. We were doing what 
was needed and feasible. The ship behaved 
well. Of course, it was some time before we 
could pause in our fierce and laborious ex- 
ertions; but all through the work, the ex- 
citement, the uproar, and some dismay, we 
were aware of this silent little man at the 
break of the poop, perfectly motionless, 
soundless, and often hidden from us by the 
drift of sprays. 

When we officers clambered at last upon 
the poop, he seemed to come out of that 
numbed composure, and shouted to us 
down wind: ''Try the pumps." Afterwards 
he disappeared. As to the ship, I need not 
say that, although she was presently swal- 
lowed up in one of the blackest nights I can 
remember, she did not disappear. In truth, 
I don't fancy that there had ever been much 
danger of that, but certainly the experience 

128 






The Character of the Foe 

was noisy and particularly distracting — and 
yet it is the memory of a very quiet silence 



that survives. 



For, after all, a gale of wind, the thing of 
mighty sound, is inarticulate. It is man 
who, in a chance phrase, interprets the ele- 
mental passion of his enemy. Thus there is 
another gale in my memory, a thing of end- 
less, deep, humming roar, moonlight, and a 
spoken sentence. 

It was off that other cape which is always 
deprived of its title as the Cape of Good 
Hope is robbed of its name. It was off the 
Horn. For a true expression of dishevelled 
wildness there is nothing like a gale in the 
bright moonlight of a high latitude. 

The ship, brought-to and bowing to enor- 
mous, flashing seas, glistened wet from deck 
to trucks; her one set sail stood out a coal- 
black shape upon the gloomy blueness of the 
air. I was a youngster then, and suffering 
from weariness, cold, and imperfect oil-skins 
which let water in at every seam. I craved 

129 



The Mirror of the Sea 

human companionship, and, coming off the 
poop, took my place by the side of the boat- 
swain (a man whom I did not like) in a 
comparatively dry spot where at worst we 
had water only up to our knees. Above our 
heads the explosive booming gusts of wind 
passed continuously, justifying the sailor's 
saying, "It blows great guns." And just 
from that need of human companionship, 
being very close to the man, I said, or 
rather shouted: 

"Blows very hard, boatswain. " 

His answer was: 

"Ay, and if it blows only a little harder 
things will begin to go. I don't mind as 
long as everything holds, but when things 
begin to go it's bad." 

The note of dread in the shouting voice, 
the practical truth of these words, heard 
years ago from a man I did not like, have 
stamped its peculiar character on that gale. 

A look in the eyes of a shipmate, a low 
murmur in the most sheltered spot where 
the watch on duty are huddled together, a 
meaning moan from one to the other with a 
glance at the windward sky, a sigh of weari- 

130 



The Character of the Foe 

ness, a gesture of disgust passing into the 
keeping of the great wind, become part and 
parcel of the gale. The olive hue of hurri- 
cane clouds presents an aspect peculiarly 
appalling. The inky, ragged wrack, flying 
before a nor 'west wind, makes you dizzy 
with its headlong speed that depicts the 
rush of the invisible air. A hard sou'wester 
startles you with its close horizon and its 
low, gray sky, as if the world were a dungeon 
wherein there is no rest for body or soul. 
And there are black-squalls, white-squalls, 
thunder-squalls, and unexpected gusts that 
come without a single sign in the sky; and 
of each kind no one of them resembles an- 
other. 

There is infinite variety in the gales of 
wind at sea, and except for the peculiar, 
terrible, and mysterious moaning that may 
be heard sometimes passing through the 
roar of a hurricane — except for that unfor- 
gettable sound, as if the soul of the universe 
had been goaded into a mournful groan — it 
is, after all, the human voice that stamps 
the mark of human consciousness upon the 
character of a gale. 

131 




Rulers of East and West 



I HERE is no part of the world 
of coasts, continents, oceans, 
seas, straits, capes, and islands 
which is not under the sway of 
a reigning wind, the sovereign 
of its typical weather. The wind rules the 
aspects of the sky and the action of the sea. 
But no wind rules unchallenged his realm of 
land and water. As with the kingdoms of 
the earth, there are regions more turbulent 
than others. In the middle belt of the earth 
the Trade Winds reign supreme, undisputed, 
like monarchs of long -settled kingdoms, 
whose traditional power, checking all undue 
ambitions, is not so much an exercise of 
personal might as the working of long-estab- 
lished institutions. The inter-tropical king- 
doms of the Trade Winds are favorable to 
the ordinary life of a merchantman. The 

132 



Rulers of East and West 

trumpet-call of strife is seldom borne on 
their wings to the watchful ears of men on 
the decks of ships. The regions ruled by 
the northeast and southeast Trade Winds 
are serene. In a southern - going ship, 
bound out for a long voyage, the passage 
through their dominions is characterized by 
a relaxation of strain and vigilance on the 
part of the seamen. Those citizens of the 
ocean feel sheltered under the aegis of an un- 
contested law, of an undisputed dynasty. 
There, indeed, if anywhere on earth, the 
weather may be trusted. 

Yet not too implicitly. Even in the con- 
stitutional realm of Trade Winds, north and 
south of the equator, ships are overtaken 
by strange disturbances. Still, the easterly 
winds, and, generally speaking, the easterly 
weather all the world over, is characterized 
by regularity and persistence. 

As a ruler, the East Wind has a remark- 
able stability ; as an invader of the high lati- 
tudes lying under the tumultuous sway of 
his great brother, the Wind of the West, he is 
extremely difficult to dislodge, by the reason 
of his cold craftiness and profound duplicity. 

*33 



The Mirror of the Sea 

The narrow seas around these isles, where 
British admirals keep watch and ward upon 
the marches of the Atlantic Ocean, are sub- 
ject to the turbulent sway of the West 
Wind. Call it northwest or southwest, it is 
all one — a different phase of the same char- 
acter, a changed expression on the same 
face. In the orientation of the winds that 
rule the seas, the north and south directions 
are of no importance. There are no North 
and South Winds of any account upon this 
earth. The North and South Winds are but 
small princes in the dynasties that make 
peace and war upon the sea. They never 
assert themselves upon a vast stage. They 
depend upon local causes — the configuration 
of coasts, the shapes of straits, the accidents 
of bold promontories round which they play 
their little part. In the polity of winds, as 
among the tribes of the earth, the real 
struggle lies between East and West. 



The West Wind reigns over the seas sur- 
rounding the coasts of these kingdoms; and 

i34 



Rulers of East and West 

from the gateways of the channels, from 
promontories as if from watch-towers, from 
estuaries of rivers as if from postern-gates, 
from passageways, inlets, straits, firths, the 
garrison of the isle and the crews of the ships 
going and returning look to the westward to 
judge by the varied splendors of his sunset 
mantle the mood of that arbitrary ruler. 
The end of the day is the time to gaze at 
the kingly face of the Westerly Weather, 
who is the arbiter of ships' destinies. Be- 
nignant and splendid, or splendid and sin- 
ister, the western sky reflects the hidden 
purposes of the royal mind. Clothed in a 
mantle of dazzling gold or draped in rags of 
black clouds like a beggar, the might of the 
Westerly Wind sits enthroned upon the 
western horizon with the whole North At- 
lantic as a footstool for his feet and the first 
twinkling stars making a diadem for his 
brow. Then the seamen, attentive courtiers 
of the weather, think of regulating the con- 
duct of their ships by the mood of the 
master. The West Wind is too great a 
king to be a dissembler: he is no calculator 
plotting deep schemes in a sombre heart ; he 

i35 



The Mirror of the Sea 

is too strong for small artifices ; there is pas- 
sion in all his moods, even in the soft mood 
of his serene days, in the grace of his blue 
sky whose immense and unfathomable ten- 
derness reflected in the mirror of the sea 
embraces, possesses, lulls to sleep the ships 
with white sails. He is all things to all 
oceans; he is like a poet seated upon 
a throne — magnificent, simple, barbarous, 
pensive, generous, impulsive, changeable, 
unfathomable — but, when you understand 
him, always the same. Some of his sunsets 
are like pageants devised for the delight of 
the multitude, when all the gems of the 
royal treasure-house are displayed above 
the sea. Others are like the opening of his 
royal confidence, tinged with thoughts of 
sadness and compassion in a melancholy 
splendor meditating upon the short-lived 
peace of the sea. And I have seen him put 
the pent-up anger of his heart into the aspect 
of the inaccessible sun, and cause it to glare 
fiercely like the eye of an implacable auto- 
crat out of a pale and frightened sky. 

He is the war-lord, who sends his bat- 
talions of Atlantic rollers to the assault of 

136 



Rulers of East and West 

our shores. The compelling voice of the 
West Wind musters up to his service all the 
might of the sea. At the bidding of the 
West Wind there arises a great commotion 
in the sky above these islands, and a great 
rush of waters falls upon our shores. The 
sky of the westerly weather is full of flying 
clouds, of great big white clouds coming 
thicker and thicker till they seem to stand 
welded into a solid canopy, upon whose 
gray face the lower wrack of the gale, thin, 
black, and angry looking, flies past with ver- 
tiginous speed. Denser and denser grows 
this dome of vapors, descending lower and 
lower upon the sea, narrowing the horizon 
around the ship. And the characteristic 
aspect of westerly weather, the thick, gray, 
smoky and sinister tone sets in, circum- 
scribing the view of the men, drenching 
their bodies, oppressing their souls, taking 
their breath away with booming gusts, deaf- 
ening, blinding, driving, rushing them on- 
ward in a swaying ship towards our coasts 
lost in mists and rain. 

The caprice of the winds, like the wilful- 
ness of men, is fraught with the disastrous 

*37 



The Mirror of the Sea 

consequences of self-indulgence. Long an- 
ger, the sense of his uncontrolled power, 
spoils the frank and generous nature of the 
West Wind. It is as if his heart were cor- 
rupted by a malevolent and brooding ran- 
cour. He devastates his own kingdom in 
the wantonness of his force. Southwest is 
the quarter of the heavens where he pre- 
sents his darkened brow. He breathes his 
rage in terrific squalls, and overwhelms his 
realm with an inexhaustible welter of clouds. 
He strews the seeds of anxiety upon the 
decks of scudding ships, makes the foam- 
stripped ocean look old, and sprinkles with 
gray hairs the heads of ship-masters in the 
homeward-bound ships running for the Chan- 
nel. The Westerly Wind asserting his sway 
from the southwest quarter is often like a 
monarch gone mad, driving forth with wild 
imprecations the most faithful of his court- 
iers to shipwreck, disaster, and death. 

The southwesterly weather is the thick 
weather par excellence. It is not the thick- 
ness of the fog; it is rather a contraction of 
the horizon, a mysterious veiling of the 
shores with clouds that seem to make a low- 

138 



Rulers of East and West 

vaulted dungeon around the running ship. 
It is not blindness; it is a shortening of the 
sight. The West Wind does not say to the 
seaman, ''You shall be blind"; it restricts 
merely the range of his vision and raises the 
dread of land within his breast. It makes 
of him a man robbed of half his force, of 
half his efficiency. Many times in my life, 
standing in long sea-boots and streaming oil- 
skins at the elbow of my commander on the 
poop of a homeward-bound ship making for 
the Channel, and gazing ahead into the gray 
and tormented waste, I have heard a weary 
sigh shape itself into a studiously casual 
comment : 

"Can't see very far in this weather." 

And have made answer in the same low, 
perfunctory tone: 

"No, sir." 

It would be merely the instinctive voicing 
of an ever-present thought associated closely 
with the consciousness of the land some- 
where ahead and of the great speed of the 
ship. Fair wind, fair wind! Who would 
dare to grumble at a fair wind? It was a 
favor of the Western King, who rules mas- 

139 



The Mirror of the Sea 

terfully the North Atlantic from the latitude 
of the Azores to the latitude of Cape Fare- 
well. A famous shove this to end a good 
passage with; and yet, somehow, one could 
not muster upon one's lips the smile of 
a courtier's gratitude. This favor was dis- 
pensed to you from under an overbearing 
scowl, which is the true expression of the 
great autocrat when he has made up his 
mind to give a battering to some ships and 
to hunt certain others home in one breath 
of cruelty and benevolence, equally dis- 
tracting. 

"No, sir. Gan't see very far." 

Thus would the mate's voice repeat the 
thought of the master, both gazing ahead, 
while under their feet the ship rushes at 
some twelve knots in the direction of the lee 
shore ; and only a couple of miles in front of 
her swinging and dripping jib-boom, carried 
naked with an upward slant like a spear, a 
gray horizon closes the view with a multi- 
tude of waves surging upward violently as 
if to strike at the stooping clouds. 

Awful and threatening scowls darken the 
face of the West Wind in his clouded, south- 

140 



Rulers of East and West 

west mood; and from the King's throne-hall 
in the western board stronger gusts reach 
you, like the fierce shouts of raving fury to 
which only the gloomy grandeur of the 
scene imparts a saving dignity. A shower 
pelts the deck and the sails of the ship as if 
flung with a scream by an angry hand; and 
when the night closes in, the night of a 
southwesterly gale, it seems more hopeless 
than the shade of Hades. The southwesterly 
mood of the great West Wind is a lightless 
mood, without sun, moon, or stars, with no 
gleam of light but the phosphorescent flashes 
of the great sheets of foam that, boiling up 
on each side of the ship, fling bluish gleams 
upon her dark and narrow hull, rolling as 
she runs, chased by enormous seas, dis- 
tracted in the tumult. 

There are some bad nights in the king- 
dom of the West Wind for homeward- 
bound ships making for the Channel; and 
the days of wrath dawn upon them colorless 
and vague like the timid turning up of in- 
visible lights upon the scene of a tyranni- 
cal and passionate outbreak, awful in the 
monotony of its method and the increasing 

141 



The Mirror of the Sea 

strength of its violence. It is the same 
wind, the same clouds, the same wildly 
racing seas, the same thick horizon around 
the ship. Only the wind is stronger, the 
clouds seem denser and more overwhelm- 
ing, the waves appear to have grown bigger 
and more threatening during the night. 
The hours, whose minutes are marked by 
the crash of the breaking seas, slip by with 
the screaming, pelting squalls overtaking 
the ship as she runs on and on with darkened 
canvas, with streaming spars and dripping 
ropes. The downpours thicken. Preceding 
each shower a mysterious gloom, like the 
passage of a shadow above the firmament of 
gray clouds, niters down upon the ship. 
Now and then the rain pours upon your 
head in streams as if from spouts. It seems 
as if your ship were going to be drowned be- 
fore she sank, as if all atmosphere had 
turned to water. You gasp, you splutter, 
you are blinded and deafened, you are sub- 
merged, obliterated, dissolved, annihilated, 
streaming all over as if your limbs, too, had 
turned to water. And every nerve on the 
alert you watch for the clearing-up mood of 

142 



Rulers of East and West 

the Western King, that shall come with a 
shift of wind as likely as not to whip all the 
three masts out of your ship in the twinkling 
of an eye. 



Heralded by the increasing fierceness of 
the squalls, sometimes by a faint flash of 
lightning like the signal of a lighted torch 
waved far away behind the clouds, the shift 
of wind comes at last, the crucial moment of 
the change from the brooding and veiled 
violence of the southwest gale to the spark- 
ling, flashing, cutting, clear-eyed anger of 
the King's northwesterly mood. You be- 
hold another phase of his passion, a fury 
bejewelled with stars, mayhap bearing the 
crescent of the moon on its brow, shaking 
the last vestiges of its torn cloud-mantle in 
inky-black squalls, with hail and sleet de- 
scending like showers of crystals and pearls, 
bounding off the spars, drumming on the 
sails, pattering on the oil-skin coats, whiten- 
ing the decks of homeward-bound ships. 
Faint, ruddy flashes of lightning flicker in 

H3 



The Mirror of the Sea 

the starlight upon her mast-heads. A chilly 
blast hums in the taut rigging, causing the 
ship to tremble to her very keel, and the 
soaked men on her decks to shiver in their 
wet clothes to the very marrow of their 
bones. Before one squall has flown over to 
sink in the eastern board, the edge of an- 
other peeps up already above the western 
horizon, racing up swift, shapeless, like a 
black bag full of frozen water ready to burst 
over your devoted head. The temper of 
the ruler of the ocean has changed. Each 
gust of the clouded mood that seemed 
warmed by the heat of a heart flaming with 
anger has its counterpart in the chilly blasts 
that seem blown from a breast turned to ice 
with a sudden revulsion of feeling. Instead 
of blinding your eyes and crushing your soul 
with a terrible apparatus of cloud and mists 
and seas and rain, the King of the West 
turns his power to contemptuous pelting of 
your back with icicles, to making your 
weary eyes water as if in grief, and your 
worn-out carcass quake pitifully. But each 
mood of the great autocrat has its own 
greatness, and each is hard to bear. Only 

144 



Rulers of East and West 

the northwest phase of that mighty display- 
is not demoralizing to the same extent, be- 
cause between the hail and sleet squalls of a 
northwesterly gale one can see a long way 
ahead. 

To see! to see! — this is the craving of the 
sailor, as of the rest of blind humanity. To 
have his path made clear for him is the as- 
piration of every human being in our be- 
clouded and tempestuous existence. I have 
heard a reserved, silent man, with no nerves 
to speak of, after three days of hard running 
in thick southwesterly weather, burst out, 
passionately: "I wish to God we could get 
sight of something!" 

We had just gone down below for a mo- 
ment to commune in a battened-down cabin, 
with a large white chart lying limp and 
damp upon a cold and clammy table under 
the light of a smoky lamp. Sprawling over 
that seaman's silent and trusted adviser, 
with one elbow upon the coast of Africa and 
the other planted in the neighborhood of 
Cape Hatteras (it was a general track-chart 
of the North Atlantic), my skipper lifted his 
rugged, hairy face, and glared at me in a 

i45 



The Mirror of the Sea 

half -exasperated, half - appealing way. We 
had seen no sun, moon, or stars for some- 
thing like seven days. By the effect of the 
West Wind's wrath the celestial bodies had 
gone into hiding for a week or more, and the 
last three days had seen the force of a south- 
west gale grow from fresh, through strong, 
to heavy, as the entries in my log-book 
could testify. Then we separated, he to go 
on deck again, in obedience to that mysteri- 
ous call that seems to sound forever in a 
ship-master's ears, I to stagger into my 
cabin with some vague notion of putting 
down the words "Very heavy weather" in 
a log-book not quite written up to date. 
But I gave it up, and crawled into my bunk 
instead, boots and hat on, all standing (it 
did not matter ; everything was soaking wet, 
a heavy sea having burst the poop skylights 
the night before), to remain in a night- 
marish state between waking and sleeping 
for a couple of hours of so-called rest. 

The southwesterly mood of the West 
Wind is an enemy of sleep, and even of a 
recumbent position, in the responsible offi- 
cers of a ship. After two hours of futile, 

146 



Rulers of East and West 

light-headed, inconsequent thinking upon 
all things under heaven in that dark, dank, 
wet and devastated cabin, I arose suddenly 
and staggered up on deck. The autocrat of 
the North Atlantic was still oppressing his 
kingdom and its outlying dependencies, even 
as far as the Bay of Biscay, in the dismal 
secrecy of thick, very thick, weather. The 
force of the wind, though we were running 
before it at the rate of some ten knots an 
hour, was so great that it drove me with a 
steady push to the front of the poop, where 
my commander was holding on. 

"What do you think of it?" he addressed 
me in an interrogative yell. 

What I really thought was that we both 
had had just about enough of it. The man- 
ner in which the great West Wind chooses 
at times to administer his possessions does 
not commend itself to a person of peaceful 
and law-abiding disposition, inclined to 
draw distinctions between right and wrong 
in the face of every force, whose standard, 
naturally, is that of might alone. But, of 
course, I said nothing. For a man caught, 
as it were, between his skipper and the 

147 



The Mirror of the Sea 

great West Wind silence is the safest sort of 
diplomacy. Moreover, I knew my skipper. 
He did not want to know what I thought. 
Ship-masters hanging on a breath before the 
thrones of the winds ruling the seas have 
their psychology, whose workings are as im- 
portant to the ship and those on board of 
her as the changing moods of the weather. 
The man, as a matter of fact, under no cir- 
cumstances, ever cared a brass farthing for 
what I or anybody else in his ship thought. 
He had had just about enough of it, I 
guessed, and what he was at really was a 
process of fishing for a suggestion. It was 
the pride of his life that he had never wasted 
a chance, no matter how boisterous, threat- 
ening, and dangerous, of a fair wind. Like 
men racing blindfold for a gap in a hedge, 
we were finishing a splendidly quick passage 
from the antipodes, with a tremendous rush 
for the Channel in as thick a weather as any 
I can remember, but his psychology did not 
permit him to bring the ship to with a fair 
wind blowing — at least not on his own in- 
itiative. And yet he felt that very soon in- 
deed something would have to be done. He 

148 



Rulers of East and West 

wanted the suggestion to come from me, so 
that later on, when the trouble was over, he 
could argue this point with his own uncom- 
promising spirit, laying the blame upon my 
shoulders. I must render him the justice 
that this sort of pride was his only weakness. 

But he got no suggestion from me. I un- 
derstood his psychology. Besides, I had 
my own stock of weaknesses at the time (it 
is a different one now), and among them 
was the conceit of being remarkably well up 
in the psychology of the Westerly Weather. 
I believed — not to mince matters — that I 
had a genius for reading the mind of the 
great ruler of high latitudes. I fancied I 
could discern already the coming of a change 
in his royal mood. And all I said was: 

"The weather shall clear up with the shift 
of wind." 

"Anybody knows that much," he snapped 
at me, at the highest pitch of his voice. 

"I mean before dark," I cried. 

This was all the opening he ever got from 
me. The eagerness with which he seized 
upon it gave me the measure of the anxiety 
he had been laboring under. 

149 



The Mirror of the Sea 

"Very well," he shouted, with an affecta- 
tion of impatience, as if giving way to long 
entreaties. ' ' All right. If we don't get a shift 
by then we'll take that foresail off her and 
put her head under the wing for the night." 

I was struck by the picturesque character 
of the phrase as applied to a ship brought-to 
in order to ride out a gale with wave after 
wave passing under her breast. I could see 
her resting in the tumult of the elements like 
a sea-bird sleeping in wild weather upon the 
raging waters with its head tucked under its 
wing. In imaginative force, in true feeling, 
this is one of the most expressive sentences 
I have ever heard on human lips. But as 
to taking the foresail off that ship before we 
put her head under her wing, I had my 
grave doubts. They were justified. That 
long - enduring piece of canvas was confis- 
cated by the arbitrary decree of the West 
Wind, to whom belong the lives of men and 
the contrivances of their hands within the 
limits of his kingdom. With the sound of a 
faint explosion it vanished into the thick 
weather bodily, leaving behind of its stout 
substance not so much as one solitary strip 

i5° 



Rulers of East and West 

big enough to be picked into a handful of 
lint for, say, a wounded elephant. Torn out 
of its bolt-ropes, it faded like a whiff of 
smoke in the smoky drift of clouds shattered 
and torn by the shift of wind. For the shift 
of wind had come. The unveiled, low sun 
glared angrily from a chaotic sky upon a 
confused and tremendous sea dashing itself 
upon a coast. We recognized the headland, 
and looked at each other in the silence of 
dumb wonder. Without knowing it in the 
least, we had run up alongside the Isle of 
Wight, and that tower, tinged a faint even- 
ing red in the salt wind-haze, was the light- 
house on St. Catherine's Point. 

My skipper recovered first from his as- 
tonishment. His bulging eyes sank back 
gradually into their orbits. His psychology, 
taking it all round, was really very credit- 
able for an average sailor. He had been 
spared the humiliation of laying his ship to 
with a fair wind; and at once that man, of 
an open and truthful nature, spoke up in 
perfect good faith, rubbing together his 
brown, hairy hands — the hands of a master 
craftsman upon the sea: 

x 5i 



The Mirror of the Sea 

"Humph! that's just about where I reck- 
oned we had got to." 

The transparency and ingenuousness, in 
a way, of that delusion, the airy tone, the 
hint of already growing pride, were perfectly 
delicious. But, in truth, this was one of the 
greatest surprises ever sprung by the clear- 
ing up mood of the West Wind upon one of 
the most accomplished of his courtiers. 



The winds of North and South are, as I 
have said, but small princes among the 
powers of the sea. They have no territory 
of their own; they are not reigning winds 
anywhere. Yet it is from their houses that 
the reigning dynasties which have shared 
between them the waters of the earth are 
sprung. All the weather of the world is 
based upon the contest of the polar and 
equatorial strains of that tyrannous race. 
The West Wind is the greatest king. The 
East rules between the tropics. They have 
shared each ocean between them. Each has 
his genius of supreme rule. The King of the 

152 



Rulers of East and West 

West never intrudes upon the recognized 
dominion of his kingly brother. He is a 
barbarian, of a northern type. Violent 
without craftiness and furious without mal- 
ice, one may imagine him seated masterfully, 
with a double - edged sword on his knees, 
upon the painted and gilt clouds of the sun- 
set, bowing his shock head of golden locks, 
a flaming beard over his breast, imposing, 
colossal, mighty limbed, with a thundering 
voice, distended cheeks, and fierce blue eyes, 
urging the speed of his gales. The other, 
the East King, the king of blood-red sun- 
rises, I represent to myself as a spare South- 
erner with clear-cut features, black-browed 
and dark-eyed, gray-robed, upright in sun- 
shine, resting a smooth-shaven cheek in the 
palm of his hand, impenetrable, secret, full 
of wiles, fine drawn, keen — meditating ag- 
gressions. 

The West Wind keeps faith with his 
brother, the King of the Easterly Weather. 
"What we have divided we have divided," 
he seems to say in his gruff voice, this ruler 
without guile, who hurls as if in sport enor- 
mous masses of cloud across the sky, and 

i53 



The Mirror of the Sea 

flings the great waves of the Atlantic clear 
across from the shores of the New World 
upon the hoary headlands of Old Europe, 
which harbors more kings and rulers upon 
its seamed and furrowed body than all the 
oceans of the world together. "What we 
have divided we have divided; and if no 
rest and peace in this world have fallen to 
my share, leave me alone. Let me play at 
quoits with cyclonic gales, flinging the disks 
of spinning cloud and whirling air from one 
end of my dismal kingdom to the other: 
over the Great Banks, along the edges of 
pack-ice — this one with true aim right into 
the bight of the Bay of Biscay, that other 
upon the fiords of Norway, across the North 
Sea where the fishermen of many nations 
look watchfully into my angry eye. This is 
the time of kingly sport." 

And * the royal master of high latitudes 
sighs mightily, with the sinking sun upon 
his breast and the double-edged sword upon 
his knees, as if wearied by the innumerable 
centuries of a strenuous rule and saddened 
by the unchangeable aspect of the ocean 
under his feet — by the endless vista of future 

i54 



Rulers of East and West 

ages where the work of sowing the wind and 
reaping the whirlwind shall go on and on till 
his realm of living waters becomes a frozen 
and motionless ocean. But the other, crafty 
and unmoved, nursing his shaven chin be- 
tween the thumb and forefinger of his slim 
and treacherous hand, thinks deep within 
his heart full of guile: "Aha! our brother of 
the West has fallen into the mood of kingly- 
melancholy . He is tired of playing with cir- 
cular gales, and blowing great guns, and un- 
rolling thick streamers of fog in childish 
sport at the cost of his own poor, miserable 
subjects. Their fate is most pitiful. Let 
us make a foray upon the dominions of that 
noisy barbarian, a great raid from Finisterre 
to Hatteras, catching his fishermen un- 
awares, baffling the fleets that trust to his 
power, and shooting sly arrows into the 
livers of men who court his good graces. 
He is, indeed, a worthless fellow." And 
forthwith, while the West Wind meditates 
upon the vanity of his irresistible might, the 
thing is done, and the Easterly Weather sets 
in upon the North Atlantic. 

The prevailing weather of the North At- 

iS5 



The Mirror of the Sea 

lantic is typical of the way in which the 
West Wind rules his realm on which the sun 
never sets. North Atlantic is the heart of a 
great empire. It is the part of the West 
Wind's dominions most thickly populated 
with generations of fine ships and hardy 
men. Heroic deeds and adventurous ex- 
ploits have been performed there, within the 
very stronghold of his sway. The best 
sailors in the world have been born and bred 
under the shadow of his sceptre, learning to 
manage their ships with skill and audacity 
before the steps of his stormy throne. 
Reckless adventurers, toiling fishermen, ad- 
mirals as wise and brave as the world has 
ever known, have waited upon the signs of 
his westerly sky. Fleets of victorious ships 
have hung upon his breath. He has tossed 
in his hand squadrons of war-scarred three- 
deckers, and shredded out in mere sport the 
bunting of flags hallowed in the traditions 
of honor and glory. He is a good friend 
and a dangerous enemy, without mercy to 
unseaworthy ships and faint-hearted sea- 
men. In his kingly way he has taken but 
little account of lives sacrificed to his im- 

156 



Rulers of East and West 

pulsive policy; he is a king with a double- 
edged sword bared in his right hand. The 
East Wind, an interloper in the dominions 
of Westerly Weather, is an impassive-faced 
tyrant with a sharp poniard held behind his 
back for a treacherous stab. 

In his forays into the North Atlantic the 
East Wind behaves like a subtle and cruel 
adventurer without a notion of honor or fair 
play. Veiling his clear-cut, lean face in a 
thin layer of a hard, high cloud, I have seen 
him, like a wizened robber sheik of the sea, 
hold up large caravans of ships to the num- 
ber of three hundred or more at the very 
gates of the English Channel. And the 
worst of it was that there was no ransom 
that we could pay to satisfy his avidity; for 
whatever evil is wrought by the raiding 
East Wind, it is done only to spite his 
kingly brother of the West. We gazed 
helplessly at the systematic, cold, gray- 
eyed obstinacy of the Easterly Weather, 
while short rations became the order of the 
day, and the pinch of hunger under the 
breast-bone grew familiar to every sailor in 
that held-up fleet. Every day added to our 

J 57 



The Mirror of the Sea 

numbers. In knots and groups and strag- 
gling parties we flung to and fro before the 
closed gate. And meantime the eastward- 
bound ships passed, running through our 
humiliated ranks under all the canvas they 
could show. It is my idea that the Easterly 
Wind helps the ships away from home in 
the wicked hope that they shall all come to 
an untimely end and be heard of no more. 
For six weeks did the robber sheik hold the 
trade route of the earth, while our liege lord, 
the West Wind, slept profoundly like a tired 
Titan, or else remained lost in a mood of 
idle sadness known only to frank natures. 
All was still to the westward; we looked in 
vain towards his stronghold: the King 
slumbered on so deeply that he let his for- 
aging brother steal the very mantle of gold- 
lined purple clouds from his bowed shoulders. 
What had become of the dazzling hoard of 
royal jewels exhibited at every close of day? 
Gone, disappeared, extinguished, carried of! 
without leaving a single gold band or the 
flash of a single sunbeam in the evening 
sky! Day after day, through a cold streak 
of heavens as bare and poor as the inside of 

158 



Rulers of East and West 

a rifled safe, a rayless and despoiled sun 
would slink shamefacedly, without pomp or 
show, to hide in haste under the waters. 
And still the King slept on, or mourned the 
vanity of his might and his power, while the 
thin-lipped intruder put the impress of his 
cold and implacable spirit upon the sky and 
sea. With every daybreak the rising sun 
had to wade through a crimson stream, lu- 
minous and sinister, like the spilled blood of 
celestial bodies murdered during the night. 

In this particular instance the mean in- 
terloper held the road for some six weeks 
on end, establishing his particular adminis- 
trative methods over the best part of the 
North Atlantic. It looked as if the Easterly 
Weather had come to stay forever, or, at 
least, till we had all starved to death in the 
h eld-up fleet — starved within sight, as it 
were, of plenty, within touch, almost, of the 
bountiful heart of the Empire. There we 
were, dotting with our white, dry sails the 
hard blueness of the deep sea. There we 
were, a growing company of ships, each 
with her burden of grain, of timber, of wool, 
of hides, and even of oranges, for we had 

i59 



The Mirror of the Sea 

one or two belated fruit schooners in com- 
pany. There we were, in that memorable 
spring of a certain year in the late seventies, 
dodging to and fro, baffled on every tack, 
and with our stores running down to sweep- 
ings of bread-lockers and scrapings of sugar- 
casks. It was just like the East Wind's 
nature to inflict starvation upon the bodies 
of unoffending sailors, while he corrupted 
their simple souls by an exasperation lead- 
ing to outbursts of profanity as lurid as his 
blood-red sunrises. They were followed by 
gray days under the cover of high, motion- 
less clouds that looked as if carved in a slab 
of ash -colored marble. And each mean, 
starved sunset left us calling with impreca- 
tions upon the West Wind even in its most 
veiled, misty mood to wake up and give us 
our liberty, if only to rush on and dash the 
heads of our ships against the very walls of 
our unapproachable home. 



In the atmosphere of the Easterly Weather, 
as pellucid as a piece of crystal and refract- 

160 



Rulers of East and West 

ing like a prism, we could see the appalling 
numbers of our helpless company, even to 
those who in more normal conditions would 
have remained invisible, sails down under 
the horizon. It is the malicious pleasure of 
the East Wind to augment the power of 
your eyesight, in order, perhaps, that you 
should see better the perfect humiliation, 
the hopeless character of your captivity. 
Easterly Weather is generally clear, and that 
is all that can be said for it — almost super- 
naturally clear when it likes; but whatever 
its mood, there is something uncanny in its 
nature. Its duplicity is such that it will de- 
ceive a scientific instrument. No barometer 
will give warning of an Easterly Gale, were it 
ever so wet. It would be an unjust and un- 
grateful thing to say that a barometer is a 
stupid contrivance. It is simply that the 
wiles of the East Wind are too much for its 
fundamental honesty. After years and years 
of experience the most trusty instrument of 
the sort that ever went to sea screwed on to 
a ship's cabin bulkhead will, almost invari- 
ably, be induced to rise by the diabolic in- 
genuity of the Easterly Weather, just at the 

161 



The Mirror of the Sea 

moment when the Easterly Weather, dis- 
carding its methods of hard, dry, impassive 
cruelty, contemplates drowning what is left 
of your spirit in torrents of a peculiarly cold 
and horrid rain. The sleet-and-hail squalls 
following the lightning at the end of a 
Westerly Gale are cold and benumbing and 
stinging and cruel enough. But the dry, 
Easterly Weather, when it turns to wet, 
seems to rain poisoned showers upon your 
head. It is a sort of steady, persistent, 
overwhelming, endlessly driving downpour, 
which makes your heart sick, and opens it 
to dismal forebodings. And the stormy 
mood of the Easterly Weather looms black 
upon the sky with a peculiar and amazing 
blackness. The West Wind hangs heavy 
gray curtains of mist and spray before your 
gaze, but the Eastern interloper of the nar- 
row seas, when he has mustered his courage 
and cruelty to the point of a gale, puts your 
eyes out, puts them out completely, makes 
you feel blind for life upon a lee- shore. It 
is the wind, also, that brings snow. 

Out of his black and merciless heart 
he flings a white, blinding sheet upon the 

162 



Rulers of East and West 

ships of the sea. He has more manners of 
villany and no more conscience than an 
Italian prince of the seventeenth century. 
His weapon is a dagger carried under a 
black cloak when he goes out on his unlaw- 
ful enterprises. The mere hint of his ap- 
proach fills with dread every craft that 
swims the sea, from fishing- smacks to four- 
masted ships that recognize the sway of the 
West Wind. Even in his most accommo- 
dating mood he inspires a dread of treachery. 
I have heard upward of ten score of wind- 
lasses spring like one into clanking life in 
the dead of night, filling the Downs with a 
panic-struck sound of anchors being torn 
hurriedly out of the ground at the first 
breath of his approach. Fortunately, his 
heart often fails him: he does not always 
blow home upon our exposed coast; he has 
not the fearless temper of his Westerly 
brother. 

The natures of those two winds that share 
the dominions of the great oceans are funda- 
mentally different. It is strange that the 
winds which men are prone to style capricious 
remain true to their character in all the vari- 

163 



The Mirror of the Sea 

ous regions of the earth. To us here [in 
England], for instance, the East Wind comes 
across a great continent, sweeping over the 
greatest body of solid land upon this earth. 
For the Australian east coast the East Wind 
is the wind of the ocean, coming across the 
greatest body of water upon the globe; and 
yet here and there its characteristics remain 
the same with a strange consistency in every- 
thing that is vile and base. The members 
of the West Wind's dynasty are modified in 
a way by the regions they rule, as a Hohen- 
zollern, without ceasing to be himself, be- 
comes a Roumanian by virtue of his throne, 
or a Saxe - Coburg learns to put the dress 
of Bulgarian phrases upon his particular 
thoughts, whatever they are. 

The autocratic sway of the West Wind, 
whether forty north or forty south of the 
equator, is characterized by an open, gen- 
erous, frank, barbarous recklessness. For 
he is a great autocrat, and to be a great 
autocrat you must be a great barbarian. I 
have been too much moulded to his sway to 
nurse now any idea of rebellion in my heart. 
Moreover; what is a rebellion within the four 

164 



Rulers of East and West 

walls of a room against the tempestuous rule 
of the West Wind ? I remain faithful to the 
memory of the mighty king with a double- 
edged sword in one hand and in the other 
holding out rewards of great daily runs and 
famously quick passages to those of his 
courtiers who know how to wait watchfully 
for every sign of his secret mood. As we 
deep-water men always reckoned, he made 
one year in three fairly lively for anybody 
having business upon the Atlantic or down 
there along the "forties" of the Southern 
Ocean. You had to take the bitter with the 
sweet; and it cannot be denied he played 
carelessly with our lives and fortunes. But, 
then, he was always a great king, fit to rule 
over the great waters where, strictly speak- 
ing, a man would have no business whatever 
but for his audacity. 

The audacious should not complain. A 
mere trader ought not to grumble at the 
tolls levied by a mighty king. His mighti- 
ness was sometimes very overwhelming; but 
even when you had to defy him openly, as 
on the banks of the Agulhas homeward- 
bound from the East Indies, or on the out- 

165 



The Mirror of the Sea 

ward passage round the Horn, he struck at 
you fairly his stinging blows (full in the 
face, too), and it was your business not to 
get too much staggered. And, after all, if 
you showed anything of a countenance, the 
good-natured barbarian would let you fight 
your way past the very steps of his throne. 
It was only now and then that the sword 
descended and a head fell; but if you fell 
you were sure of impressive obsequies and 
of a roomy, generous grave. 

Such is the king to whom Viking chief- 
tains bowed their heads, and whom the 
modern and palatial steamship defies with 
impunity seven times a week. And yet it is 
but defiance, not victory. The magnificent 
barbarian sits enthroned in a mantle of gold- 
lined clouds looking from on high on great 
ships gliding like mechanical toys upon his 
sea, and on men who, armed with fire and 
iron, no longer need to watch anxiously for 
the slightest sign of his royal mood. He is 
disregarded ; but he has kept all his strength, 
all his splendor, and a great part of his 
power. Time itself, that shakes all the 
thrones, is on the side of that king. The 

166 



Rulers of East and West 

sword in his hand remains as sharp as ever 
upon both its edges ; and he may well go on 
playing his royal game of quoits with hurri- 
canes, tossing them over from the continent 
of republics to the continent of kingdoms, in 
the assurance that both the new republics 
and the old kingdoms, the heat of fire and 
the strength of iron, with the untold genera- 
tions of audacious men, shall crumble to 
dust at the steps of his throne, and pass 
away and be forgotten before his own rule 
comes to an end. 



The Faithful River 




!HE estuaries of rivers appeal 
strongly to an adventurous im- 
agination. This appeal is not 
always a charm, for there are 
estuaries of a particularly dis- 
piriting ugliness : lowlands, mud - flats, or 
perhaps barren sand - hills without beauty 
of form or amenity of aspect, covered with 
a shabby and scanty vegetation conveying 
the impression of poverty and uselessness. 
Sometimes such an ugliness is merely a re- 
pulsive mask. A river whose estuary re- 
sembles a breach in a sand rampart may 
flow through a most fertile country. But 
all the estuaries of great rivers have their 
fascination, the attractiveness of an open 
portal. Water is friendly to man. The 
ocean, a part of nature farthest removed in 
the unchangeableness and majesty of its 

168 



The Faithful River 

might from the spirit of mankind, has ever 
been a friend to the enterprising nations of 
the earth. And of all the elements this is 
the one to which men have always been 
prone to trust themselves, as if its im- 
mensity held a reward as vast as itself. 

From the offing the open estuary promises 
every possible fruition to adventurous hopes. 
That road open to enterprise and courage 
invites the explorer of coasts to new efforts 
towards the fulfilment of great expectations. 
The commander of the first Roman galley 
must have looked with an intense absorp- 
tion upon the estuary of the Thames as 
he turned the beaked prow of his ship to 
the westward under the brow of the North 
Foreland. The estuary of the Thames is 
not beautiful; it has no noble features, no 
romantic grandeur of aspect, no smiling 
geniality; but it is wide open, spacious, in- 
viting, hospitable at the first glance, with a 
strange air of mysteriousness which lingers 
about it to this very day. The navigation 
of his craft must have engrossed all the 
Roman's attention in the calm of a sum- 
mer's day (he would choose his weather), 

169 



The Mirror of the Sea 

when the single row of long sweeps (the gal- 
ley would be a light one, not a trireme) 
could fall in easy cadence upon a sheet of 
water like plate-glass, reflecting faithfully 
the classic form of his vessel and the contour 
of the lonely shores close on his left hand. 
I assume he followed the land and passed 
through what is at present known as Mar- 
gate Roads, groping his careful way along 
the hidden sand-banks, whose every tail and 
spit has its beacon or buoy nowadays. He 
must have been anxious, though no doubt 
he had collected beforehand on the shores 
of the Gauls a store of information from 
the talk of traders, adventurers, fishermen, 
slave-dealers, pirates — all sorts of unofficial 
men connected with the sea in a more or less 
reputable way. He would have heard of 
channels and sand-banks, of natural features 
of the land useful for sea-marks, of villages 
and tribes and modes of barter and precau- 
tions to take: with the instructive tales 
about native chiefs dyed more or less blue, 
whose character for greediness, ferocity, or 
amiability must have been expounded to 
him with that capacity for vivid language 

170 



The Faithful River 

which seems joined naturally to the shadi- 
ness of moral character and recklessness of 
disposition. With that sort of spiced food 
provided for his anxious thought, watchful 
for strange men, strange beasts, strange 
turns of the tide, he would make the best of 
his way up, a military seaman with a short 
sword on thigh and a bronze helmet on his 
head, the pioneer post-captain of an im- 
perial fleet. Was the tribe inhabiting the 
Isle of Thanet of a ferocious disposition, I 
wonder, and ready to fall with stone-studded 
clubs and wooden lances hardened in the 
fire, upon the backs of unwary mariners ? 

Among the great commercial streams of 
these islands, the Thames is the only one, I 
think, open to romantic feeling, from the 
fact that the sight of human labor and the 
sounds of human industry do not come 
down its shores to the very sea, destroying 
the suggestion of mysterious vastness caused 
by the configuration of the shore. The 
broad inlet of the shallow North Sea passes 
gradually into the contracted shape of the 
river; but for a long time the feeling of the 
open water remains with the ship steering 

13 iyi 



The Mirror of the Sea 

to the westward through one of the lighted 
and buoyed passageways of the Thames, 
such as Queen's Channel, Prince's Channel, 
Four-Fathom Channel; or else coming down 
the Swin from the north. The rush of the 
yellow flood-tide hurries her up as if into 
the unknown between the two fading lines 
of the coast. There are no features to this 
land, no conspicuous, far-famed landmarks 
for the eye; there is nothing so far down to 
tell you of the greatest agglomeration of 
mankind on earth dwelling no more than 
twenty miles away, where the sun sets in a 
blaze of color flaming on a gold background, 
and the dark, low shores trend towards each 
other. And in the great silence the deep, 
faint booming of the big guns being tested 
at Shoeburyness hangs about the Nore — a 
historical spot in the keeping of one of Eng- 
land's appointed guardians. 



The Nore sand remains covered at low- 
water, and never seen by human eye; but 
the Nore is a name to conjure with visions 

172 



The Faithful River 

of historical events, of battles, of fleets, of 
mutinies, of watch and ward kept upon the 
great, throbbing heart of the state. This 
ideal point of the estuary, this centre of 
memories, is marked upon the steely gray 
expanse of the waters by a light-ship paint- 
ed red, that, from a couple of miles off, looks 
like a cheap and bizarre little toy. I re- 
member how, on coming up the river for the 
first time, I was surprised at the smallness 
of that vivid object — a tiny, warm speck of 
crimson lost in an immensity of gray tones. 
I was startled, as if of necessity the princi- 
pal beacon in the waterway of the greatest 
town on earth should have presented impos- 
ing proportions. And, behold! the brown 
sprit-sail of a barge hid it entirely from my 
view. 

Coming in from the eastward, the bright 
coloring of the light-ship marking the part of 
the river committed to the charge of an ad- 
miral (the commander-in-chief at the Nore) 
accentuates the dreariness and the great 
breadth of the Thames estuary. But soon 
the course of the ship opens the entrance of 
the Medway, with its men-of-war moored in 

i73 



The Mirror of the Sea 

line, and the long, wooden jetty of Port Vic- 
toria, with its few low buildings like the be- 
ginning of a hasty settlement upon a wild 
and unexplored shore. The famous Thames 
barges sit in brown clusters upon the water 
with an effect of birds floating upon a pond. 
On the imposing expanse of the great estuary 
the traffic of the port where so much of the 
world's work and the world's thinking is 
being done becomes insignificant, scattered, 
streaming away in thin lines of ships string- 
ing themselves out into the eastern quarter 
through the various navigable channels of 
which the Nore light-ship marks the diver- 
gence. The coasting traffic inclines to the 
north ; the deep-water ships steer east with a 
southern inclination, on through the Downs, 
to the most remote ends of the world. In 
the widening of the shores sinking low in 
the gray, smoky distances the greatness of 
the sea receives the mercantile fleet of good 
ships that London sends out upon the turn 
of every tide. They follow one another, go- 
ing very close by the Essex shore. Like the 
beads of a rosary told by business-like ship- 
owners for the greater profit of the world 

i74 



The Faithful River 

they slip one by one into the open: while in 
the offing the inward-bound ships come up 
singly and in bunches from under the sea- 
horizon closing the mouth of the river be- 
tween Orfordness and North Foreland. They 
all converge upon the Nore, the warm speck 
of red upon the tones of drab and gray, with 
the distant shores running together tow- 
ards the west, low and flat, like the sides of 
an enormous canal. The sea - reach of the 
Thames is straight, and, once Sheerness is 
left behind, its banks seem very uninhabited, 
except for the cluster of houses which is 
Southend, or here and there a lonely wooden 
jetty where petroleum ships discharge their 
dangerous cargoes, and the oil-storage tanks, 
low and round with slightly domed roofs, 
peep over the edge of the foreshore, as it 
were a village of Central African huts imi- 
tated in iron. Bordered by the black and 
shining mud-flats, the level marsh extends 
for miles. Away in the far background the 
land rises, closing the view with a continu- 
ous wooded slope, forming in the distance 
an interminable rampart overgrown with 
bushes. 

i75 



The Mirror of the Sea 

Then, on the slight turn of the Lower 
Hope Reach, clusters of factory chimneys 
come distinctly into view, tall and slender 
above the squat ranges of cement works in 
Grays and Greenhithe. Smoking quietly at 
the top against the great blaze of a magnifi- 
cent sunset, they give an industrial character 
to the scene, speak of work, manufactures, 
and trade, as palm-groves on the coral 
strands of distant islands speak of the lux- 
uriant grace, beauty, and vigor of tropical 
nature. The houses of Gravesend crowd 
upon the shore with an effect of confusion as 
if they had tumbled down hap-hazard from 
the top of the hill at the back. The flatness 
of the Kentish shore ends there. A fleet of 
steam-tugs lies at anchor in front of the 
various piers. A conspicuous church-spire, 
the first seen distinctly coming from the sea, 
has a thoughtful grace, the serenity of a fine 
form above the chaotic disorder of men's 
houses. But on the other side, on the flat 
Essex side, a shapeless and desolate red edi- 
fice, a vast pile of bricks with many windows 
and a slate roof more inaccessible than an 
Alpine slope, towers over the bend in mon- 

176 



The Faithful River 

strous ugliness, the tallest, heaviest building 
for miles around, a thing like a hotel, like a 
mansion of flats (all to let), exiled into these 
fields out of a street in West Kensington. 
Just round the corner, as it were, on a pier 
defined with stone blocks and wooden piles, 
a white mast, slender like a stalk of straw 
and crossed by a yard like a knitting- 
needle, flying the signals of flag and balloon, 
watches over a set of heavy dock-gates. 
Mast-heads and funnel-tops of ships peep 
above the ranges of corrugated iron roofs. 
This is the entrance to Tilbury Dock, the 
most recent of all London docks, the nearest 
to the sea. 

Between the crowded houses of Graves- 
end and the monstrous red-brick pile on the 
Essex shore the ship is surrendered fairly to 
the grasp of the river. That hint of loneli- 
ness, that soul of the sea which had accom- 
panied her as far as the Lower Hope Reach, 
abandons her at the turn of the first bend 
above. The salt, acrid flavor is gone out of 
the air, together with a sense of unlimited 
space opening free beyond the threshold of 
sand-banks below the Nore. The waters of 

177 



The Mirror of the Sea 

the sea rush on past Gravesend, tumbling 
the big mooring-buoys laid along the face of 
the town; but the sea-freedom stops short 
there, surrendering the salt tide to the needs, 
the artifices, the contrivances of toiling men. 
Wharves, landing-places, dock-gates, water- 
side stairs, follow one another continuously 
right up to London Bridge, and the hum of 
men's work fills the river with a menacing, 
muttering note as of a breathless, ever- 
driving gale. The waterway, so fair above 
and wide below, flows oppressed by bricks 
and mortar and stone, by blackened timber 
and grimed glass and rusty iron, covered 
with black barges, whipped up by paddles 
and screws, overburdened with craft, over- 
hung with chains, overshadowed by walls 
making a steep gorge for its bed, filled with 
a haze of smoke and dust. 

This stretch of the Thames from London 
Bridge to the Albert Docks is to other 
water - sides of river - ports what a virgin 
forest would be to a garden. It is a thing 
grown up, not made. It recalls a jungle by 
the confused, varied, and impenetrable as- 
pect of the buildings that line the shore, not 

178 



The Faithful River 

according to a planned purpose, but as if 
sprung up by accident from scattered seeds. 
Like the matted growth of bushes and 
creepers veiling the silent depths of an un- 
explored wilderness, they hide the depths of 
London's infinitely varied, vigorous, seeth- 
ing life. In other river -ports it is not so. 
They lie open to their stream, with quays 
like broad clearings, with streets like ave- 
nues cut through thick timber for the con- 
venience of trade. I am thinking now of 
river-ports I have seen — of Antwerp, for in- 
stance; of Nantes or Bordeaux, or even old 
Rouen, where the night-watchmen of ships, 
elbows on rail, gaze at shop-windows and 
brilliant cafes, and see the audience go in 
and come out of the opera-house. But 
London, the oldest and greatest of river- 
ports, does not possess as much as a hun- 
dred yards of open quays upon its river- 
front. Dark and impenetrable at night, like 
the face of a forest, is London's water-side. 
It is the water -side of water -sides, where 
only one aspect of the world's life can be 
seen, and only one kind of men toils on the 
edge of the stream. The lightless walls 

179 



The Mirror of the Sea 

seem to spring from the very mud upon 
which the stranded barges lie ; and the nar- 
row lanes coming down to the foreshore re- 
semble the paths of smashed bushes and 
crumbled earth where big game comes to 
drink on the banks of tropical streams. 

Behind the growth of the London water- 
side the docks of London spread out unsus- 
pected, smooth, and placid, lost among the 
buildings like dark lagoons hidden in a 
thick forest. They lie concealed in the in- 
tricate growth of houses with a few stalks 
of mast-heads here and there overtopping 
the roof of some seven-story warehouse. 

It is a strange conjunction, this, of roofs 
and mast-heads, of walls and yard-arms. I 
remember once having the incongruity of 
the relation brought home to me in a prac- 
tical way. I was the chief officer of a fine 
ship, just docked with a cargo of wool from 
Sydney, after a ninety days' passage. In 
fact, we had not been in more than half an 
hour and I was still busy making her fast to 
the stone posts of a very narrow quay in 
front of a lofty warehouse. An old man 
with a gray whisker under the chin and 

1 80 



The Faithful River 

brass buttons on his pilot-cloth jacket, hur- 
ried up along the quay hailing my ship by 
name. He was one of those officials called 
berthing - masters — not the one who had 
berthed us, but another, who, apparently, 
had been busy securing a steamer at the 
other end of the dock. I could see from 
afar his hard blue eyes staring at us, as if 
fascinated, with a queer sort of absorption. 
I wondered what that worthy sea-dog had 
found to criticise in my ship's rigging. And 
I, too, glanced aloft anxiously. I could see 
nothing wrong there. But perhaps that 
superannuated fellow-craftsman was simply 
admiring the ship's perfect order aloft, I 
thought with some secret pride ; for the chief 
officer is responsible for his ship's appear- 
ance, and as to her outward condition, he is 
the man open to praise or blame. Mean- 
time the old salt (''ex-coasting skipper" 
was writ large all over his person) had 
hobbled up alongside in his bumpy, shiny 
boots, and, waving an arm, short and thick 
like the flipper of a seal, terminated by a 
paw red as an uncooked beefsteak, addressed 
the poop in a muffled, faint, roaring voice, 

181 



The Mirror of the Sea 

as if a sample of every North Sea fog of his 
life had been permanently lodged in his 
throat: "Haul 'em round, Mr. Mate!" were 
his words. "If you don't look sharp, you'll 
have your top - gallant - yards through the 
windows of that 'ere warehouse presently." 
This was the only cause of his interest in 
the ship's beautiful spars. I own that for a 
time I was struck dumb by the bizarre as- 
sociations of yard-arms and window-panes. 
To break windows is the last thing one 
would think of in connection with a ship's 
top - gallant - yard, unless, indeed, one were 
an experienced berthing - master in one of 
the London docks. This old chap was do- 
ing his little share of the world's work with 
proper efficiency. His little, blue eyes had 
made out the danger many hundred yards 
off. His rheumaticky feet, tired with bal- 
ancing that squat body for many years upon 
the decks of small coasters, and made sore 
by miles of tramping upon the flag - stones 
of the dock-side, had hurried up in time to 
avert a ridiculous catastrophe. I answered 
him pettishly, I fear, and as if I had known 
all about it before. 

182 



The Faithful River 

"All right, all right! can't do everything 
at once." 

He remained near by, muttering to him- 
self till the yards had been hauled round at 
my order, and then raised again his foggy, 
thick voice : 

"None too soon," he observed, with a 
critical glance up at the towering side of the 
warehouse. ' ' That's a half-sovereign in your 
pocket, Mr. Mate. You should always look 
first how you are for them windows before 
you begin to breast in your ship to the 
quay." 

It was good advice. But one cannot 
think of everything or foresee contacts of 
things apparently as remote as stars and 
hop-poles. 



The view of ships lying moored in some of 
the older docks of London has always sug- 
gested to my mind the image of a flock of 
swans kept in the flooded back-yard of grim 
tenement-houses. The flatness of the walls 
surrounding the dark pool on which they 

183 



The Mirror of the Sea 

float brings out wonderfully the flowing 
grace of the lines on which a ship's hull is 
built. The lightness of these forms, de- 
vised to meet the winds and the seas, makes, 
by contrast with the great piles of bricks, 
the chains and cables of their moorings ap- 
pear very necessary, as if nothing less could 
prevent them from soaring upward and over 
the roofs. The least puff of wind stealing 
round the corners of the dock buildings stirs 
these captives fettered to rigid shores. It is 
as if the soul of a ship were impatient of 
confinement. Those masted hulls, relieved 
of their cargo, become restless at the slight- 
est hint of the wind's freedom. However 
tightly moored, they range a little at their 
berths, swaying imperceptibly the spirelike 
assemblages of cordage and spars. You can 
detect their impatience by watching the 
sway of the mast-heads against the motion- 
less, the soulless gravity of mortar and 
stones. As you pass alongside each hope- 
less prisoner chained to the quay, the slight 
grinding noise of the wooden fenders makes 
a sound of angry muttering. But, after all, 
it may be good for ships to go through a 

184 



The Faithful River 

period of restraint and repose, as the re- 
straint and self - communion of inactivity 
may be good for an unruly soul — not, in- 
deed, that I mean to say that ships are un- 
ruly; on the contrary, they are faithful 
creatures, as so many men can testify. And 
faithfulness is a great restraint, the strongest 
bond laid upon the self-will of men and ships 
on this globe of land and sea. 

This interval of bondage in the docks 
rounds each period of a ship's life with the 
sense of accomplished duty, of an effectively 
played part in the work of the world. The 
dock is the scene of what the world would 
think the most serious part in the light, 
bounding, swaying life of a ship. But there 
are docks and docks. The ugliness of some 
docks is appalling. Wild horses would not 
drag from me the name of a certain river in 
the north whose narrow estuary is inhos- 
pitable and dangerous, and whose docks are 
like a nightmare of dreariness and misery. 
Their dismal shores are studded thickly with 
scaffold-like, enormous timber structures, 
whose lofty heads are veiled periodically by 
the infernal gritty night of a cloud of coal- 

185 



The Mirror of the Sea 

dust. The most important ingredient for 
getting the world's work along is distributed 
there under the circumstances of the greatest 
cruelty meted out to helpless ships. Shut 
up in the desolate circuit of these basins, 
you would think a free ship would droop 
and die like a wild bird put into a dirty 
cage. But a ship, perhaps becatise of her 
faithfulness to men, will endure an extraor- 
dinary lot of ill-usage. Still, I have seen 
ships issue from certain docks like half-dead 
prisoners from a dungeon, bedraggled, over- 
come, wholly disguised in dirt, and with 
their men rolling white eyeballs in black 
and worried faces raised to a heaven which, 
in its smoky and soiled aspect, seemed to 
reflect the sordidness of the earth below. 
One thing, however, may be said for the 
docks of the port of London on both sides 
of the river: for all the complaints of their 
insufficient equipment, of their obsolete 
rules, of failure (they say) in the matter of 
quick despatch, no ship need ever issue from 
their gates in a half - fainting condition. 
London is a general cargo port, as is only 
proper for the greatest capital of the world 

186 



The Faithfui River 

to be. General cargo ports belong to the 
aristocracy of the earth's trading - places, 
and in that aristocracy London, as is its 
way, has a unique physiognomy. 

The absence of picturesqueness cannot be 
laid to the charge of the docks opening into 
the Thames. For all my unkind compari- 
son to swans and backyards, it cannot be 
denied that each dock or group of docks 
along the north side of the river has its own 
individual attractiveness. Beginning with 
the cosey little St. Katherine's Dock, lying 
overshadowed and black like a quiet pool 
among rocky crags, through the venerable 
and sympathetic London Docks, with not a 
single line of rails in the whole of their area 
and the aroma of spices lingering between 
its warehouses, with their far-famed wine- 
cellars — down through the interesting group 
of West India Docks, the fine docks at 
Blackwall, on past the Galleons Reach en- 
trance of the Victoria and Albert Docks, 
right down to the vast gloom of the great 
basins in Tilbury, each of those places of 
restraint for ships has its own peculiar phys- 
iognomy, its own expression. And what 

13 187 



The Mirror of the Sea 

makes them unique and attractive is their 
common trait of being romantic in their 
usefulness. 

In their way they are as romantic as the 
river they serve is unlike all the other com- 
mercial streams of the world. The cosiness 
of the St. ^Catherine's Dock, the old-world 
air of the London Docks, remain impressed 
upon the memory. The docks down the 
river, abreast of Woolwich, are imposing by 
their proportions and the vast scale of the 
ugliness that forms their surroundings — 
ugliness so picturesque as to become a de- 
light to the eye. When one talks of the 
Thames docks "beauty" is a vain word, but 
romance has lived too long upon this river 
not to have thrown a mantle of glamour 
upon its banks. 

The antiquity of the port appeals to the 
imagination by the long chain of adventu- 
rous enterprises that had their inception in 
the town and floated out into the world on 
the waters of the river. Even the newest of 
the docks, the Tilbury Dock, shares in the 
glamour conferred by historical associations. 
Queen Elizabeth has made one of her prog- 

188 



The Faithful River 

r esses down there, not one of her journeys 
of pomp and ceremony, but an anxious busi- 
ness progress at a crisis of national history. 
The menace of that time has passed away, 
and now Tilbury is known by its docks. 
These are very modern, but their remote- 
ness and isolation upon the Essex marsh, 
the days of failure attending their creation, 
invested them with a romantic air. Noth- 
ing in those days could have been more 
striking than the vast, empty basins, sur- 
rounded by miles of bare quays and the 
ranges of cargo -sheds, where two or three 
ships seemed lost like bewitched children 
in a forest of gaunt, hydraulic cranes. One 
received a wonderful impression of utter 
abandonment, of wasted efficiency. From 
the first the Tilbury Docks were very effi- 
cient and ready for their task, but they had 
come, perhaps, too soon into the field. A 
great future lies before Tilbury Docks. 
They shall never fill a long-felt want (in the 
sacramental phrase that is applied to rail- 
ways, tunnels, newspapers, and new editions 
of books) . They were too early in the field. 
The want shall never be felt because, free of 

189 



The Mirror of the Sea 

the trammels of the tide, easy of access, 
magnificent and desolate, they are already 
there, prepared to take and keep the biggest 
ships that float upon the sea. They are 
worthy of the oldest river-port in the world. 
And, truth to say, for all the criticisms 
flung upon the heads of the dock com- 
panies, the other docks of the Thames are 
no disgrace to the town with a population 
greater than that of some commonwealths. 
The growth of London as a well-equipped 
port has been slow, while not unworthy of a 
great capital, of a great centre of distribu- 
tion. It must not be forgotten that London 
has not the backing of great industrial dis- 
tricts or great fields of natural exploitation. 
In this it differs from Liverpool, from Cardiff, 
from Newcastle, from Glasgow; and therein 
the Thames differs from the Mersey, from 
the Tyne, from the Clyde. It is a historical 
river ; it is a romantic stream flowing through 
the centre of great affairs, and for all the 
criticisms of the river's administration, my 
contention is that its development has been 
worthy of its dignity. For a long time the 
stream itself could accommodate quite easily 

190 



The Faithful River 

the oversea and coasting traffic. That was 
in the days when, in the part called the 
Pool, just below London Bridge, the vessels 
moored stem and stern in the very strength 
of the tide formed one solid mass like an 
island covered with a forest of gaunt, leaf- 
less trees ; and when the trade had grown too 
big for the river, there came the St. Kath- 
erine's Docks and the London Docks, mag- 
nificent undertakings answering to the need 
of their time. The same may be said of the 
other artificial lakes full of ships that go in 
and out upon this high-road to all parts of 
the world. The labor of the imperial water- 
way goes on from generation to generation, 
goes on day and night. Nothing ever ar- 
rests its sleepless industry but the coming of 
a heavy fog, which clothes the teeming 
stream in a mantle of impenetrable stillness. 
After the gradual cessation of all sound 
and movement on the faithful river, only 
the ringing of ships' bells is heard, mysteri- 
ous and muffled in the white vapor from 
London Bridge right down to the Nore, for 
miles and miles in a decrescendo tinkling, to 
where the estuary broadens out into the 

191 



The Mirror of the Sea 

North Sea, and the anchored ships lie scat- 
tered thinly in the shrouded channels be- 
tween the sand - banks of the Thames 's 
mouth. Through the long and glorious tale 
of years of the river's strenuous service to 
its people these are its only breathing times. 



In Captivity 




SHIP in dock, surrounded by 
quays and the walls of ware- 
houses, has the appearance of 
a prisoner meditating upon free- 
dom in the sadness of a free 
spirit put under restraint. Chain cables 
and stout ropes keep her bound to stone 
posts at the edge of a paved shore, and 
a berthing - master, with brass buttons on 
his coat, walks about like a weather-beaten 
and ruddy jailer, casting jealous, watchful 
glances upon the moorings that fetter a ship 
lying passive and still and safe, as if lost in 
deep regrets of her days of liberty and 
danger on the sea. 

The swarm of renegades — dock-masters, 
berthing-masters, gatemen, and such like — 
appear to nurse an immense distrust of 
the captive ship's resignation. There never 

i93 



The Mirror of the Sea 

seem chains and ropes enough to satisfy 
their minds concerned with the safe binding 
of free ships to the strong, muddy, enslaved 
earth. "You had better put another bight 
of a hawser astern, Mr. Mate," is the usual 
phrase in their mouths. I brand them for 
renegades, because most of them have been 
sailors in their time. As if the infirmities of 
old age — the gray hair, the wrinkles at the 
corners of the eyes, and the knotted veins 
of the hands — were the symptoms of moral 
poison, they prowl about the quays with an 
underhand air of gloating over the broken 
spirit of noble captives. They want more 
fenders, more breasting-ropes ; they want 
more springs, more shackles, more fetters; 
they want to make ships with volatile souls 
as motionless as square blocks of stone. 
They stand on the mud of pavements, these 
degraded sea-dogs, with long lines of rail- 
way trucks clanking their couplings behind 
their backs, and run malevolent glances over 
your ship from head -gear to taffrail, only 
wishing to tyrannize over the poor creature, 
under the hypocritical cloak of benevolence 
and care. Here and there cargo-cranes look- 

194 



In Captivity 

ing like instruments of torture for ships 
swing cruel hooks at the end of long chains. 
Gangs of dock-laborers swarm with muddy 
feet over the gangways. It is a moving 
sight this, of so many men of the earth 
earthy, who never cared anything for a ship, 
trampling unconcerned, brutal and hob- 
nailed upon her helpless body. 

Fortunately, nothing can deface the beau- 
ty of a ship. That sense of a dungeon, that 
sense of a horrible and degrading misfort- 
une overtaking a creature fair to see and 
safe to trust, attaches only to ships moored 
in the docks of great European ports. You 
feel that they are dishonestly locked up, to 
be hunted about from wharf to wharf on a 
dark, greasy, square pool of black water as 
a brutal reward at the end of a faithful 
voyage. 

A ship anchored in an open roadstead, 
with cargo - lighters alongside and her own 
tackle swinging the burden over the rail, is 
accomplishing in freedom a function of her 
life. There is no restraint; there is space: 
clear water around her, and a clear sky 
above her mast-heads, with a landscape of 

i95 



The Mirror of the Sea 

green hills and charming bays opening 
around her anchorage. She is not aban- 
doned by her own men to the tender mercies 
of shore people. She still shelters, and is 
looked after by, her own little, devoted band, 
and you feel that presently she will glide be- 
tween the headlands and disappear. It is 
only at home, in dock, that she lies aban- 
doned, shut off from freedom by all the 
artifices of men that think of quick despatch 
and profitable freights. It is only then that 
the odious, rectangular shadows of walls 
and roofs fall upon her decks, with showers 
of soot. 

To a man who has never seen the ex- 
traordinary nobility, strength, and grace 
that the devoted generations of ship-builders 
have evolved from some pure nooks of their 
simple souls, the sight that could be seen 
five-and- twenty years ago, of a large fleet of 
clippers moored along the north side of the 
New South Dock was an inspiring spectacle. 
Then there was a quarter of a mile of them, 
from the iron dockyard - gates guarded by 
policemen, in a long, forest-like perspective 
of masts, moored two and two to many 

196 



In Captivity 

stout wooden jetties. Their spars dwarfed 
with their loftiness the corrtigated-iron sheds, 
their jib-booms extended far over the shore, 
their white-and-gold figure-heads, almost daz- 
zling in their purity, overhung the straight, 
long quay above the mud and dirt of the 
wharf-side, with the dwarfed figures of groups 
and single men moving to and fro, rest- 
less and grimy under their soaring immo- 
bility. 

At tide-time you would see one of the 
loaded ships with battened-down hatches 
drop out of the ranks and float in the clear 
space of the dock, held by lines dark and 
slender, like the first threads of a spider's 
web, extending from her bows and her 
quarters to the mooring - posts on shore. 
There, graceful and still, like a bird ready to 
spread its wings, she waited till, at the open- 
ing of the gates, a tug or two would hurry 
in noisily, hovering round her with an air of 
fuss and solicitude, and take her out into 
the river, tending, shepherding her through 
open bridges, through dam - like gates be- 
tween the flat pier - heads, with a bit of 
green lawn surrounded by gravel and a 

197 



The Mirror of the Sea 

white signal-mast with yard and gaff, fly- 
ing a couple of dingy blue, red, or white 
flags. 

This New South Dock (it was its official 
name), round which my earlier professional 
memories are centred, belongs to the group 
of West India Docks, together with two 
smaller and much older basins called Im- 
port and Export respectively, both with the 
greatness of their trade departed from them 
already. Picturesque and clean as docks go, 
these twin basins spread side by side the 
dark lustre of their glassy water, sparely 
peopled by a few ships laid up on buoys 
or tucked far away from one another at the 
end of sheds in the corners of empty quays, 
where they seemed to slumber quietly re- 
mote, untouched by the bustle of men's 
affairs — in retreat rather than in captivity. 
They were quaint and sympathetic, those 
two homely basins, unfurnished and silent, 
with no aggressive display of cranes, no ap- 
paratus of hurry and work on their narrow 
shores. No railway lines cumbered them. 
The knots of laborers trooping in clumsily 
round the corners of cargo-sheds to eat their 

198 



In Captivity 

food in peace out of red cotton handkerchiefs 
had the air of picnicking by the side of a 
lonely mountain pool. They were restful 
(and I should say very unprofitable), those 
basins, where the chief officer of one of the 
ships involved in the harassing, strenuous, 
noisy activity of the New South Dock only 
a few yards away could escape in the din- 
ner-hour to stroll, unhampered by men and 
affairs, meditating (if he chose) on the 
vanity of all things human. At one time 
they must have been full of good, old, slow 
West Indiamen of the square-stern type, 
that took their captivity, one imagines, as 
stolidly as they had faced the buffeting of 
the waves with their blunt, honest bows, 
and disgorged sugar, rum, molasses, coffee, 
or logwood sedately with their own winch 
and tackle. But when I knew them, of ex- 
ports there was never a sign that one could 
detect; and all the imports I have ever seen 
were some rare cargoes of tropical timber, 
enormous balks roughed out of iron trunks 
grown in the woods about the Gulf of 
Mexico. They lay piled up in stacks of 
mighty boles, and it was hard to believe 

199 



The Mirror of the Sea 

that all this mass of dead and stripped trees 
had come out of the flanks of a slender, in- 
nocent - looking little bark with, as likely 
as not, a homely woman's name — Ellen this 
or Annie that — upon her fine bows. But 
this is generally the case with a discharged 
cargo. Once spread at large over the quay, 
it looks the most impossible bulk to have 
all come there out of that ship along- 
side. 

They were quiet, serene nooks in the busy 
world of docks, these basins where it has 
never been my good luck to get a berth 
after some more or less arduous passage. 
But one could see at a glance that men and 
ships were never hustled there. They were 
so quiet that, remembering them well, one 
comes to doubt that they ever existed — 
places of repose for tired ships to dream in, 
places of meditation rather than work, 
where wicked ships — the cranky, the lazy, 
the wet, the bad sea-boats, the wild steerers, 
the capricious, the pig-headed, the generally 
ungovernable — would have full leisure to 
take count and repent of their sins, sorrow- 
ful and naked, with their rent garments of 

200 



In Captivity 

sail - cloth stripped off them and with the 
dust and ashes of the London atmosphere 
upon their mast-heads. For that the worst 
of ships would repent if she were ever given 
time I make no doubt. I have known too 
many of them. No ship is wholly bad ; and 
now that their bodies that had braved so 
many tempests have been blown off the face 
of the sea by a puff of steam, the evil and 
the good together into the limbo of things 
that have served their time, there can be 
no harm in affirming that in these van- 
ished generations of willing servants there 
never has been one utterly unredeemable 
soul. 

In the New South Dock there was cer- 
tainly no time for remorse, introspection, 
repentance, or any phenomena of inner life 
either for the captive ships or for their offi- 
cers. From six in the morning till six at 
night the hard labor of the prison-house, 
which rewards the valiance of ships that win 
the harbor, went on steadily, great slings of 
general cargo swinging over the rail, to drop 
plumb into the hatchways at the sign of the 
gangway-tender's hand. The New South 

201 



The Mirror of the Sea 

Dock was especially a loading dock for the 
colonies in those great (and last) days of 
smart wool-clippers, good to look at and — 
well — exciting to handle. Some of them 
were more fair to see than the others ; many 
were (to put it mildly) somewhat over- 
masted; all were expected to make good 
passages ; and of all that line of ships, whose 
rigging made a thick, enormous net - work 
against the sky, whose brasses flashed al- 
most as far as the eye of the policeman at 
the gates could reach, there was hardly one 
that knew of any other port among all the 
ports on the wide earth but London and 
Sydney, or London and Melbourne, or Lon- 
don and Adelaide, perhaps with Hobart 
Tow T n added for those of smaller tonnage. 
One could almost have believed, as her gray- 
whiskered second mate used to say of the 

old Duke of S , that they knew the road 

to the antipodes better than their own 
skippers, who, year in, year out, took them 
from London — the place of captivity — 
to some Australian port where, twenty- 
five years ago, though moored well and 
tight enough to the wooden wharves, they 

202 



In Captivity 

felt themselves no captives, but honored 
guests. 



These towns of the antipodes, not so 
great then as they are now, took an interest 
in the shipping, the running links with 
"home," whose numbers confirmed the 
sense of their growing importance. They 
made it part and parcel of their daily in- 
terests. This was especially the case in 
Sydney, where, from the heart of the fair 
city, down the vista of important streets, 
could be seen the wool-clippers lying at the 
Circular Quay — no walled prison-house of a 
dock that, but the integral part of one of 
the finest, most beautiful, vast, and safe 
bays the sun ever shone upon. Now great 
steam-liners lie at these berths, always re- 
served for the sea aristocracy — grand and 
imposing enough ships, but here to-day and 
gone next week; whereas the general cargo, 
emigrant, and passenger clippers of my 
time, rigged with heavy spars, and built on 
fine lines, used to remain for months to- 
14 203 



The Mirror of the Sea 

gether waiting for their load of wool. Their 
names attained the dignity of household 
words. On Sundays and holidays the citi- 
zens trooped down, on visiting bent, and the 
lonely officer on duty solaced himself by 
playing the cicerone — especially to the citi- 
zenesses with engaging manners and a well- 
developed sense of the fun that may be got 
out of the inspection of a ship's cabins and 
state-rooms. The tinkle of more or less un- 
tuned cottage pianos floated out of open 
stern - ports till the gas - lamps began to 
twinkle in the streets, and the ship's night- 
watchman, coming sleepily on duty after 
his unsatisfactory day slumbers, hauled 
down the flags and fastened a lighted lan- 
tern at the break of the gangway. The 
night closed rapidly upon the silent ships 
with their crews on shore. Up a short, 
steep ascent by the King's Head pub., 
patronized by the cooks and stewards of the 
fleet, the voice of a man crying "Hot sav- 
eloys!" at the end of George Street, where 
the cheap eating-houses (sixpence a meal) 
were kept by Chinamen (Sun-kum-on's was 
not bad), is heard at regular intervals. I 

204 



In Captivity 

have listened for hours to this most perti- 
nacious peddler (I wonder whether he is 
dead or has made a fortune), while sitting 

on the rail of the old Duke of S (she's 

dead, poor thing! a violent death on the 
coast of New Zealand), fascinated by the 
monotony, the regularity, the abruptness of 
the recurring cry, and so exasperated at the 
absurd spell, that I wished the fellow would 
choke himself to death with a mouthful of 
his own infamous wares. 

A stupid job, and fit only for an old man, 
my comrades used to tell me, to be the 
night-watchman of a captive (though hon- 
ored) ship. And generally the oldest of the 
able seamen in a ship's crew does get it. 
But sometimes neither the oldest nor any 
other fairly steady seaman is forthcoming. 
Ships' crews had the trick of melting away 
swiftly in those days. So, probably on ac- 
count of my youth, innocence, and pensive 
habits (which made me sometimes dilatory 
in my work about the rigging), I was sud- 
denly nominated, in our chief mate Mr. 
B 's most sardonic tones, to that en- 
viable situation. I do not regret the ex- 

205 



The Mirror of the Sea 

perience. The night humors of the town 
descended from the street to the water-side 
in the still watches of the night: larrikins 
rushing down in bands to settle some quarrel 
by a stand-up fight, away from the police, 
in an indistinct ring half hidden by piles of 
cargo, with the sounds of blows, a groan 
now and then, the stamping of feet, and the 
cry of "Time!" rising suddenly above the 
sinister and excited murmurs; night-prowl- 
ers, pursued or pursuing, with a stifled 
shriek followed by a profound silence, or 
slinking stealthily alongside like ghosts, and 
addressing me from the quay below in mys- 
terious tones with incomprehensible proposi- 
tions. The cabmen, too, who twice a week, 
on the night when the A. S. N. Company's 
passenger-boat was due to arrive, used to 
range a battalion of blazing lamps opposite 
the ship, were very amusing in their way. 
They got down from their perches and told 
one another impolite stories in racy language, 
every word of which reached me distinctly 
over the bulwarks as I sat smoking on the 
main-hatch. On one occasion I had an hour 
or so of a most intellectual conversation 

206 



In Captivity 

with a person whom I could not see dis- 
tinctly, a gentleman from England, he said, 
with a cultivated voice, I on deck and he 
on the quay sitting on the case of a piano 
(landed out of our hold that very after- 
noon), and smoking a cigar which smelled 
very good. We touched, in our discourse, 
upon science, politics, natural history, and 
operatic singers. Then, after remarking 
abruptly, "You seem to be rather intelli- 
gent, my man," he informed me pointedly 
that his name was Mr. Senior, and walked 
off — to his hotel, I suppose. Shadows! 
Shadows! I think I saw a white whisker as 
he turned under the lamp-post. It is a 
shock to think that in the natural course of 
nature he must be dead by now. There was 
nothing to object to in his intelligence but a 
little dogmatism maybe. And his name was 
Senior! Mr. Senior! 

The position had its drawbacks, however. 
One wintry, blustering, dark night in July, 
as I stood sleepily out of the rain under the 
crease of the poop something resembling an 
ostrich dashed up the gangway. I say os- 
trich because the creature, though it ran on 

207 



The Mirror of the Sea 

two legs, appeared to help its progress by- 
working a pair of short wings ; it was a man, 
however, only his coat, ripped up the back 
and flapping in two halves about his head, 
gave him that weird and fowl-like appear- 
ance. At least, I suppose it was his coat, 
for it was impossible to make him out dis- 
tinctly. How he managed to come so 
straight upon me, at speed and without a 
stumble over a strange deck, I cannot im- 
agine. He must have been able to see in 
the dark better than any cat. He over- 
whelmed me with panting entreaties to let 
him take shelter till morning in our fore- 
castle. Following my strict orders, I re- 
fused his request, mildly at first, in a sterner 
tone as he insisted with growing impudence. 

"For God's sake let me, matey! Some of 
'em are after me — and I've got hold of a 
ticker here." 

"You clear out of this!" I said. 

"Don't be hard on a chap, old man!" he 
whined, pitifully. 

"Now then, get ashore at once. Do you 
hear?" 

Silence. He appeared to cringe, mute, as 

208 



In Captivity 

if words had failed him through grief, then 
— bang! came a concussion and a great flash 
of light in which he vanished, leaving me 
prone on my back with the most abomi- 
nable black eye that anybody ever got in 
the faithful discharge of duty. Shadows! 
Shadows! I hope he escaped the enemies 
he was fleeing from to live and flourish to 
this day. But his fist was uncommonly 
hard and his aim miraculously true in the 
dark. 

There were other experiences, less painful 
and more funny for the most part, with one 
among them of a dramatic complexion; but 
the greatest experience of them all was Mr. 
B , our chief mate himself. 

He used to go ashore every night to fore- 
gather in some hotel's parlor with his crony, 
the mate of the bark Cicero, lying on the 
other side of the Circular Quay. Late at 
night I would hear from afar their stumbling 
footsteps and their voices raised in endless 
argument. The mate of the Cicero was see- 
ing his friend on board. They would con- 
tinue their senseless and muddled discourse 
in tones of profound friendship for half an 

209 



The Mirror of the Sea 

hour or so at the shore end of our gangway, 

and then I would hear Mr. B insisting 

that he must see the other on board his ship. 
And away they would go, their voices, still 
conversing with excessive amity, being heard 
moving all round the harbor. It happened 
more than once that they would thus per- 
ambulate three or four times the distance, 
each seeing the other on board his ship out 
of pure and disinterested affection. Then, 
through sheer weariness, or perhaps in a 
moment of forgetfulness, they would man- 
age to part from each other somehow, and 
by-and-by the planks of our long gangway 
would bend and creak under the weight of 
Mr. B— — coming on board for good at last. 

On the rail his burly form would stop and 
stand swaying. 

''Watchman!" 

"Sir." 

A pause. 

He waited for a moment of steadiness be- 
fore negotiating the three steps of the inside 
ladder from rail to deck ; and the watchman, 
taught by experience, would forbear offering 
help which would be received as an insult at 

2IO 



In Captivity 

that particular stage of the mate's return. 
But many times I trembled for his neck. 
He was a heavy man. 

Then with a rush and a thump it would be 
done. He never had to pick himself up; 
but it took him a minute or so to pull him- 
self together after the descent. 

"Watchman!" 

"Yes, sir." 

"Captain aboard?" 

"Yes, sir." 

Pause. 

"Dog aboard?" 

"Yes, sir." 

Pause. 

Our dog was a gaunt and unpleasant 
beast, more like a wolf in poor health than 

a dog, and I never noticed Mr. B at any 

other time show the slightest interest in the 
doings of the animal. But that question 
never failed. 

"Let's have your arm to steady me along. " 

I was always prepared for that request. 
He leaned on me heavily till near enough 
the cabin door to catch hold of the handle. 
Then he would let go my arm at once. 

211 



The Mirror of the Sea 

"That '11 do. I can manage now." 

And he could manage. He could manage 
to find his way into his berth, light his lamp, 
get into his bed — ay, and get out of it when 
I called him at half-past five, the first man 
on deck, lifting the cup of morning coffee to 
his lips with a steady hand, ready for duty 
as though he had virtuously slept ten solid 
hours — a better chief officer than many a 
man who had never tasted grog in his life. 
He could manage all that, but could never 
manage to get on in life. 

Only once he failed to catch hold of the 
cabin -door handle at the first grab. He 
waited a little, tried again, and again failed. 
His weight was growing heavier on my arm. 
He sighed slowly. 

"D— n that handle!" 

Without letting go his hold of me he turn- 
ed about, his face lit up bright as day by the 
full moon. 

"I wish she were out at sea," he growled, 
savagely. 

"Yes, sir." 

I felt the need to say something, because 
he hung on to me as if lost, breathing heavily. 

212 



In Captivity 

"Ports are no good — ships rot, men go to 
the devil!" 

I kept still, and after a while he repeated 
with a sigh: 

"I wish she were at sea out of this." 

"So do I, sir," I ventured. 

Holding my shoulder, he turned upon me. 

"You! What's that to you where she is? 
You don't — drink." 

And even on that night he "managed it" 
at last. He got hold of the handle. But 
he did not manage to light his lamp (I don't 
think he even tried), though in the morning 
as usual he was the first on deck, bull- 
necked, curly-headed, watching the hands 
turn- to with his sardonic expression and un- 
flinching gaze. 

I met him ten years afterwards, casually, 
unexpectedly, in the street, on coming out 
of my consignee office. I was not likely to 
have forgotten him with his "I can manage 
now." He recognized me at once, remem- 
bered my name, and in what ship I had 
served under his orders. He looked me 
over from head to foot. 

"What are you doing here?" he asked. 

213 



The Mirror of the Sea 

"I am commanding a little bark," I said, 
1 ' loading here for Mauritius. ' ' Then, thought- 
lessly, I added: "And what are you doing, 
Mr. B ?" 

"I," he said, looking at me unflinchingly, 
with his old sardonic grin, ' ' I am looking 
for something to do." 

I felt I would rather have bitten out my 
tongue. His jet-black, curly hair had turn- 
ed iron-gray; he was scrupulously neat as 
ever, but frightfully threadbare. His shiny 
boots were worn down at heel. But he for- 
gave me, and we drove off together in a 
hansom to dine on board my ship. He went 
over her conscientiously, praised her heartily, 
congratulated me on my command with ab- 
solute sincerity. At dinner, as I offered him 
wine and beer he shook his head, and as I 
sat looking at him interrogatively, muttered 
in an undertone : 

"I've given up all that." 

After dinner we came again on deck. It 
seemed as though he could not tear himself 
away from the ship. We were fitting some 
new lower rigging, and he hung about, ap- 
proving, suggesting, giving me advice in his 

214 



In Captivity 

old manner. Twice he addressed me as 
' ' My boy, ' ' and corrected himself quickly to 
"Captain." My mate was about to leave 
me (to get married), but I concealed the fact 

from Mr. B . I was afraid he would ask 

me to give him the berth in some ghastly 
jocular hint that I could not refuse to take. 
I was afraid. It would have been impos- 
sible. I could not have given orders to Mr. 

B , and I am sure he would not have 

taken them from me very long. He could 
not have managed that, though he had man- 
aged to break himself from drink — too late. 

He said good-bye at last. As I watched 
his burly, bull-necked figure walk away up 
the street, I wondered with a sinking heart 
whether he had much more than the price of 
a night's lodging in his pocket. And I un- 
derstood that if that very minute I were to 
call out after him, he would not even turn his 
head. He, too, is no more than a shadow, 
but I seem to hear his words spoken on the 
moonlit deck of the old Duke of S : 

"Ports are no good — ships rot, men go to 
the devil!" 



Initiation 




[HIPS!" exclaimed an elderly 
seaman in clean, shore togs. 
"Ships!" — and his keen glance, 
turning away from my face, 
ran along the vista of magnifi- 
cent figure-heads that in the late seventies 
used to overhang in a serried rank the 
muddy pavement by the side of the New 
South Dock — "ships are all right; it's the 
men in 'em. ..." 

Fifty hulls, at least, moulded on lines of 
beauty and speed — hulls of wood, of iron, 
expressing in their forms the highest achiever 
ment of modern ship-building — lay moored 
all in a row, stem to quay, as if assembled 
there for an exhibition, not of a great in- 
dustry, but of a great art. Their colors 
were gray, black, dark-green, with a narrow 
strip of yellow moulding defining their sheer, 

216 



Initiation 

or with a row of painted ports decking in 
warlike decoration their robust flanks of 
cargo-carriers that would know no triumph 
but of speed in carrying a burden, no glory 
other than of a long service, no victory but 
that of an endless, obscure contest with the 
sea. The great empty hulls with swept 
holds, just out of dry-dock, with their paint 
glistening freshly, sat high-sided with pon- 
derous dignity alongside the wooden jetties, 
looking more like unmovable buildings than 
things meant to go afloat; others, half load- 
ed, far on the way to recover the true sea- 
physiognomy of a ship brought down to her 
load-line, looked more accessible. Their less 
steeply slanting gangways seemed to invite 
the strolling sailors in search of a berth to 
walk on board and try ' ' for a chance ' ' with 
the chief mate, the guardian of a ship's effi- 
ciency. As if anxious to remain unper- 
ceived among their overtopping sisters, two 
or three " finished " ships floated low, with 
an air of straining at the leash of their level 
headfasts, exposing to view their cleared 
decks and covered hatches, prepared to drop 
stern first out of the laboring ranks, display- 

217 



The Mirror of the Sea 

ing the true comeliness of form which only 
her proper sea -trim gives to a ship. And 
for a good quarter of a mile, from the dock- 
yard-gate to the farthest corner, where the 
old housed-in hulk, the President (drill-ship 
then of the Naval Reserve) , used to lie with 
her frigate side rubbing against the stone of 
the quay, above all these hulls, ready and 
unready, a hundred and fifty lofty masts, 
more or less, held out the web of their rig- 
ging like an immense net, in whose close 
mesh, black against the sky, the heavy yards 
seemed to be entangled and suspended. 

It was a sight. The humblest craft that 
floats makes its appeal to a seaman by the 
faithfulness of her life; and this was the 
place where one beheld the aristocracy of 
ships. It was a noble gathering of the fair- 
est and the swiftest, each bearing at the 
bow the carved emblem of her name, as in 
a gallery of plaster-casts, figures of women 
with mural crowns, women with flowing 
robes, with gold fillets on their hair or blue 
scarves round their waists, stretching out 
rounded arms as if to point the way; heads 
of men helmeted or bare; full lengths of 

218 



Initiation 

warriors, of kings, of statesmen, of lords and 
princesses, all white from top to toe; with 
here and there a dusky, turbaned figure, be- 
dizened in many colors, of some Eastern 
sultan or hero, all inclined forward under 
the slant of mighty bowsprits as if eager to 
begin another run of eleven thousand miles 
in their leaning attitudes. These were the 
fine figure-heads of the finest ships afloat. 
But why, unless for the love of the life those 
effigies shared with us in their wandering 
impassivity, should one try to reproduce in 
words an impression of whose fidelity there 
can be no critic and no judge, since such an 
exhibition of the art of ship-building and 
the art of figure-head carving as was seen 
from year's end to year's end in the open- 
air gallery of the New South Dock no man's 
eye shall behold again? All that patient, 
pale company of queens and princesses, of 
kings and warriors, of allegorical women, of 
heroines and statesmen and heathen gods, 
crowned, helmeted, bareheaded, has run for 
good off the sea, stretching to the last above 
the tumbling foam their fair, rounded arms, 
holding out their spears, swords, shields, 
*s 219 



The Mirror of the Sea 

tridents in the same unwearied, striving-for- 
ward pose. And nothing remains but linger- 
ing perhaps in the memory of a few men, the 
sound of their names, vanished a long time 
ago from the first page of the great London 
dailies; from big posters in railway stations 
and the doors of shipping-offices ; from the 
minds of sailors, dock-masters, pilots, and 
tugmen; from the hail of gruff voices and 
the flutter of signal-flags exchanged between 
ships closing upon each other and drawing 
apart in the open immensity of the sea. 

The elderly, respectable seaman, with- 
drawing his gaze from that multitude of 
spars, gave me a glance to make sure of our 
fellowship in the craft and mystery of the 
sea. We had met casually, and had got 
into contact as I had stopped near him, my 
attention being caught by the same peculi- 
arity he was looking at in the rigging of an 
obviously new ship, a ship with her reputa- 
tion all to make yet in the talk of the sea- 
men who were to share their life with her. 
Her name was already on their lips. I had 
heard it uttered between two thick, red- 
necked fellows of the semi - nautical type 

220 



Initiation 

at the Fenchurch Street railway station, 
where, in those days, the every - day male 
crowd was attired in jerseys and pilot-cloth 
mostly, and had the air of being more con- 
versant with the times of high-water than 
with the times of the trains. I had noticed 
that new ship's name on the first page of 
my morning paper. I had stared at the -un- 
familiar grouping of its letters, blue on white 
ground, on the advertisement boards, when- 
ever the train came to a stand-still alongside 
one of the shabby, wooden, wharf-like plat- 
forms of the dock railway line. She had 
been named, with proper observances, on 
the day she came off the stocks, no doubt, 
but she was very far yet from ''having a 
name." Untried, ignorant of the ways of 
the sea, she had been thrust among that re- 
nowned company of ships to load for her 
maiden voyage. There was nothing to 
vouch for her soundness and the worth of 
her character but the reputation of the 
building - yard whence she was launched 
headlong into the world of waters. She 
looked modest to me. I imagined her diffi- 
dent, lying very quiet, with her side nestling 

221 



The Mirror of the Sea 

shyly against the wharf to which she was 
made fast with very new lines, intimidated 
by the company of her tried and experi- 
enced sisters already familiar with all the 
violences of the ocean and the exacting love 
of men. They had had more long voyages 
to make their names in than she had known 
weeks of carefully tended life, for a new ship 
receives as much attention as if she were a 
young bride. Even crabbed old dock-mas- 
ters look at her with benevolent eyes. In 
her shyness at the threshold of a labori- 
ous and uncertain life, where so much is ex- 
pected of a ship, she could not have been 
better heartened and comforted, had she 
only been able to hear and understand, than 
by the tone of deep conviction in which 
my elderly, respectable seaman repeated the 
first part of his saying, "Ships are all 
right. . . ." 

His civility prevented him from repeating 
the other, the bitter part. It had occurred 
to him that it was perhaps indelicate to in- 
sist. He had recognized in me a ship's offi- 
cer, very possibly looking for a berth like 
himself, and so far a comrade, but still a 

222 



Initiation 

man belonging to that sparsely peopled 
after-end of a ship, where a great part of 
her reputation as a "good ship," in sea- 
man's parlance, is made or marred. 

"Can you say that of all ships without 
exception?" I asked, being in an idle mood, 
because, if an obvious ship's officer, I was 
not, as a matter of fact, down at the docks 
to "look for a berth," an occupation as en- 
grossing as gambling, and as little favorable 
to the free exchange of ideas, besides being 
destructive of the kindly temper needed for 
casual intercourse with one's fellow-creatures. 

"You can always put up with 'em," 
opined the respectable seaman judicially. 

He was not averse from talking, either. 
If he had come down to the dock to look 
for a berth, he did not seem oppressed by 
anxiety as to his chances. He had the 
serenity of a man whose estimable character 
is fortunately expressed by his personal ap- 
pearance in an unobtrusive yet convincing 
manner which no chief officer in want of 
hands could resist. And, true enough, I 
learned presently that the mate of the 
Hyperion had "taken down" his name for 

223 



The Mirror of the Sea 

quartermaster. "We sign on Friday, and 
join next day for the morning tide," he re- 
marked, in a deliberate, careless tone, which 
contrasted strongly with his evident readi- 
ness to stand there yarning for an hour or 
so with an utter stranger. 

"Hyperion ," I said. "I don't remember 
ever seeing that ship anywhere. What sort 
of a name has she got?" 

It appeared from his discursive answer 
that she had not much of a name one way 
or another. She was not very fast. It took 
no fool, though, to steer her straight, he be- 
lieved. Some years ago he had seen her in 
Calcutta, and he remembered being told by 
somebody then that on her passage up the 
river she had carried away both her hawse- 
pipes. But that might have been the 
pilot's fault. Just now, yarning with the 
apprentices on board, he had heard that 
this very voyage, brought up in the Downs, 
outward-bound, she broke her sheer, struck 
adrift, and lost an anchor and chain. But 
that might have occurred through want 
of careful tending in a tideway. All the 
same, this looked as though she were pretty 

224 



Initiation 

hard on her ground-tackle. Didn't it ? She 
seemed a heavy ship to handle, anyway. 
For the rest, as she had a new captain and a 
new mate this voyage, he understood, one 
couldn't say how she would turn out. . . . 

In such marine shore-talk as this is the 
name of a ship slowly established, her fame 
made for her, the tale of her qualities and 
of her defects kept, her idiosyncrasies com- 
mented upon with the zest of personal gos- 
sip, her achievements made much of, her 
faults glossed over as things that, being 
without remedy in our imperfect world, 
should not be dwelt upon too much by men 
who, with the help of ships, wrest out a 
bitter living from the rough grasp of the 
sea. AH that talk makes up her "name," 
which is handed over from one crew to an- 
other without bitterness, without animosity, 
with the indulgence of mutual dependence, 
and with the feeling of close association in 
the exercise of her perfections and in the 
danger of her defects. 

This feeling explains men's pride in ships. 
"Ships are all right," as my middle-aged, 
respectable quartermaster said with much 

225 



The Mirror of the Sea 

conviction and some irony ; but they are not 
exactly what men make them. They have 
their own nature; they can of themselves 
minister to our self-esteem by the demand 
their qualities make upon our skill and their 
shortcomings upon our hardiness and en- 
durance. Which is the more flattering ex- 
action it is hard to say ; but there is the fact 
that in listening for upward of twenty years 
to the sea-talk that goes on afloat and 
ashore I have never detected the true note 
of animosity. I won't deny that at sea, 
sometimes, the note of profanity was audi- 
ble enough in those chiding interpellations 
a wet, cold, weary seaman addresses to his 
ship, and iri moments of exasperation is dis- 
posed to extend to all ships that ever were 
launched — to the whole everlastingly ex- 
acting brood that swims in deep waters. 
And I have heard curses launched at the 
unstable element itself, whose fascination, 
outlasting the accumulated experience of 
ages, had captured him as it had captured 
the generations of his forebears. 

For all that has been said of the love that 
certain natures (on shore) have professed to 

226 



Initiation 

feel for it, for all the celebrations it had been 
the object of in prose and song, the sea has 
never been friendly to man. At most it has 
been the accomplice of human restlessness, 
and playing the part of dangerous abettor of 
world-wide ambitions. Faithful to no race 
after the manner of the kindly earth, re- 
ceiving no impress from valor and toil and 
self-sacrifice, recognizing no finality of do- 
minion, the sea has never adopted the cause 
of its masters like those lands where the 
victorious nations of mankind have taken 
root, rocking their cradles and setting up 
their gravestones. He — man or people — 
who, putting his trust in the friendship of 
the sea, neglects the strength and cunning 
of his right hand, is a fool! As if it were 
too great, too mighty for common virtues, 
the ocean has no compassion, no faith, no 
law, no memory. Its fickleness is to be held 
true to men's purposes only by an undaunt- 
ed resolution, and by a sleepless, armed, 
jealous vigilance, in which, perhaps, there 
has always been more hate than love. Odi 
et amo may well be the confession of those 
who consciously or blindly have surrendered 

227 



The Mirror of the Sea 

their existence to the fascination of the sea. 
All the tempestuous passions of mankind's 
young days, the love of loot and the love of 
glory, the love of adventure and the love of 
danger, with the great love of the unknown 
and vast dreams of dominion and power, 
have passed like images reflected from a 
mirror, leaving no record upon the myste- 
rious face of the sea. Impenetrable and 
heartless, the sea has given nothing of itself 
to the suitors for its precarious favors. Un- 
like the earth, it cannot be subjugated at 
any cost of patience and toil. For all its 
fascination that has lured so many to a vio- 
lent death, its immensity has never been 
loved as the mountains, the plains, the 
desert itself, have been loved. Indeed, I 
suspect that, leaving aside the protestations 
and tributes of writers who, one is safe in 
saying, care for little else in the world than 
the rhythm of their lines and the cadence of 
their phrase,' the love of the sea, to which 
some men and nations confess so readily, is 
a complex sentiment wherein pride enters 
for much, necessity for not a little, and the 
love of ships — the untiring servants of our 

228 



Initiation 

hopes and our self-esteem — for the best and 
most genuine part. For the hundreds who 
have reviled the sea, beginning with Shake- 
speare in the line — 

" More fell than hunger, anguish, or the sea," 

down to the last obscure sea-dog of the ''old 
model, " having but few words and still 
fewer thoughts, there could not be found, I 
believe, one sailor who has ever coupled a 
curse with the good or bad name of a ship. 
If ever his profanity, provoked by the hard- 
ships of the sea, went so far as to touch his 
ship, it would be lightly, as a hand may, 
without sin, be laid in the way of kindness 
on a woman. 



The love that is given to ships is pro- 
foundly different from the love men feel for 
every other work of their hands — the love 
they bear to their houses, for instance — be- 
cause it is untainted by the pride of posses- 
sion. The pride of skill, the pride of re- 

229 



The Mirror of the Sea 

sponsibility, the pride of endurance there 
may be, but otherwise it is a disinterested 
sentiment. No seaman ever cherished a 
ship, even if she belonged to him, merely 
because of the profit she put in his pocket. 
No one, I think, ever did; for a ship-owner, 
even of the best, has always been outside 
the pale of that sentiment embracing in a 
feeling of intimate, equal fellowship the ship 
and the man, backing each other against 
the implacable, if sometimes dissembled, 
hostility of their world of waters. The sea 
— this truth must be confessed — has no gen- 
erosity. No display of manly qualities — 
courage, hardihood, endurance, faithfulness 
— has ever been known to touch its irre- 
sponsible consciousness of power. The ocean 
has the conscienceless temper of a savage 
autocrat spoiled by much adulation. He 
cannot brook the slightest appearance of de- 
fiance, and has remained the irreconcilable 
enemy of ships and men ever since ships and 
men had the unheard of audacity to go 
afloat together in the face of his frown. 
From that day he has gone on swallowing 
up fleets and men without his resentment 

230 



Initiation 

being glutted by the number of victims — by 
so many wrecked ships and wrecked lives. 
To-day, as ever, he is ready to beguile and 
betray, to smash and to drown the incorri- 
gible optimism of men who, backed by the 
fidelity of ships, are trying to wrest from 
him the fortune of their house,. the dominion 
of their world, or only a dole of food for 
their hunger. If not always in the hot 
mood to smash, he is always stealthily ready 
for a drowning. The most amazing wonder 
of the deep is its unfathomable cruelty. 

I felt its dread for the first time in mid- 
Atlantic one day, many years ago, when we 
took off the crew of a Danish brig homeward- 
bound from the West Indies. A thin, silvery 
mist softened the calm and majestic splendor 
of light without shadows — seemed to render 
the sky less remote and the ocean less im- 
mense. It was one of the days when the 
might of the sea appears indeed lovable, like 
the nature of a strong man in moments of 
quiet intimacy. At sunrise we had made 
out a black speck to the westward, appar- 
ently suspended high up in the void behind 
a stirring, shimmering veil of silvery blue 

231 



The Mirror of the Sea 

gauze that seemed at times to stir and float 
in the breeze which fanned us slowly along. 
The peace of that enchanting forenoon was 
so profound, so untroubled, that it seemed 
that every word pronounced loudly on our 
deck would penetrate to the very heart of 
that infinite mystery born from the con- 
junction of water and sky. We did not 
raise our voices. "A water-logged derelict, 
I think, sir," said the second officer, quietly, 
coming down from aloft with the binoculars 
in their case slung across his shoulders ; and 
our captain, without a word, signed to the 
helmsman to steer for the black speck. 
Presently we made out a low, jagged stump 
sticking up forward— all that remained of 
her departed masts. 

The captain was expatiating in a low, con- 
versational tone to the chief mate upon the 
danger of these derelicts, and upon his 
dread of coming upon them at night, when 
suddenly a man forward screamed out, 
''There's people on board of her, sir! I see 
them!" in a most extraordinary voice — a 
voice never heard before in our ship; the 
amazing voice of a stranger. It gave the 

232 



Initiation 

signal for a sudden tumult of shouts. The 
watch below ran up the forecastle head in a 
body, the cook dashed out of the galley. 
Everybody saw the poor fellows now. They 
were there ! And all at once our ship, which 
had the well-earned name of being without 
a rival for speed in light winds, seemed to 
us to have lost the power of motion, as if 
the sea, becoming viscous, had clung to 
her sides. And yet she moved. Immensity, 
the inseparable companion of a ship's life, 
chose that day to breathe upon her as gently 
as a sleeping child. The clamor of our ex- 
citement had died out, and our living ship, 
famous for never losing steerage way as long 
as there was air enough to float a feather, 
stole, without a ripple, silent and white as a 
ghost, towards her mutilated and wounded 
sister, come upon at the point of death in 
the sunlit haze of a calm day at sea. 

With the binoculars glued to his eyes, the 
captain said in a quavering tone: "They are 
waving to us with something aft there." 
He put down the glasses on the skylight 
brusquely, and began to walk about the 
poop. "A shirt or a flag," he ejaculated, 

233 



The Mirror of the Sea 

irritably. ''Can't make it out. . . . Some 
damn rag or other!" He took a few more 
turns on the poop, glancing down over the 
rail now and then to see how fast we were 
moving. His nervous footsteps rang sharp- 
ly in the quiet of the ship, where the other 
men, all looking the same way, had forgotten 
themselves in a staring immobility. "This 
will never do!" he cried out, suddenly. 
"Lower the boats at once! Down with 
them!" 

Before I jumped into mine he took me 
aside, as being an inexperienced junior, for 
a word of warning. 

"You look out as you come alongside 
that she doesn't take you down with her. 
You understand?" 

He murmured this confidentially, so that 
none of the men at the falls should overhear, 
and I was shocked. "Heavens! as if in 
such an emergency one stopped to think of 
danger!" I exclaimed to myself mentally, in 
scorn of such cold-blooded caution. 

It takes many lessons to make a real 
seaman, and I got my rebuke at once. 
My experienced commander seemed in one 

234 



Initiation 

searching glance to read my thoughts on 
my ingenuous face. 

"What you're going for is to save life, not 
to drown your boat's crew for nothing," he 
growled severely in my ear. But as we 
shoved off he leaned over and cried out: 
"It all rests on the power of your arms, 
men. Give way for life!" 

We made a race of it, and I would never 
have believed that a common boat's crew of 
a merchantman could keep up so much de- 
termined fierceness in the regular swing of 
their stroke. What our captain had clearly 
perceived before we left had become plain to 
all of us since. The issue of our enterprise 
hung on a hair above that abyss of waters 
which will not give up its dead till the Day 
of Judgment. It was a race of two ship's 
boats matched against Death for a prize of 
nine men's lives, and Death had a long start. 
We saw the crew of the brig from afar 
working at the pumps — still pumping on 
that wreck, which already had settled so 
far down that the gentle, low swell, over 
which our boats rose and fell easily without 
a check to their speed, welling up almost 

16 235 



The Mirror of the Sea 

level with her head-rails, plucked at the 
ends of broken gear swinging desolately un- 
der her naked bowsprit. 

We could not, in all conscience, have 
picked out a better day for our regatta had 
we had the free choice of all the days that 
ever dawned upon the lonely struggles and 
solitary agonies of ships since the Norse 
rovers first steered to the westward against 
the run of Atlantic waves. It was a very 
good race. At the finish there was not an 
oar's -length between the first and second 
boat, with Death coming in a good third on 
the top of the very next smooth swell, for 
all one knew to the contrary. The scuppers 
of the brig gurgled softly all together when 
the water rising against her sides subsided 
sleepily with a low wash, as if playing about 
an immovable rock. Her bulwarks were 
gone fore - and - aft, and one saw her bare 
deck low-lying like a raft and swept clean 
of boats, spars, houses — of everything ex- 
cept the ring-bolts and the heads of the 
pumps. I had one dismal glimpse of it as 
I braced myself up to receive upon my 
breast the last man to leave her, the 

236 



Initiation 

captain, who literally let himself fall into 
my arms. 

It had been a weirdly silent rescue — a 
rescue without a hail, without a single ut- 
tered word, without a gesture or a sign, 
without a conscious exchange of glances. 
Up to the very last moment those on board 
stuck to their pumps, which spouted two 
clear streams of water upon their bare feet. 
Their brown skin showed through the rents 
of their shirts ; and the two small bunches of 
half-naked, tattered men went on bowing 
from the waist to one another in their back- 
breaking labor, up and down, absorbed, 
with no time for a glance over the shoulder 
at the help that was coming to them. As 
we dashed, unregarded, alongside, a voice let 
out one, only one hoarse howl of command, 
and then, just as they stood, without caps, 
with the salt drying gray in the wrinkles 
and folds of their hairy, haggard faces, 
blinking stupidly at us their red eyelids, 
they made a bolt away from the handles, 
tottering and jostling against one another, 
and positively flung themselves over upon 
our very heads. The clatter they made 

237 



The Mirror of the Sea 

tumbling into the boats had an extraordi- 
narily destructive effect upon the illusion of 
tragic dignity our self-esteem had thrown 
over the contests of mankind with the sea. 
On that exquisite day of gently breathing 
peace and veiled sunshine perished my ro- 
mantic love to what men's imagination had 
proclaimed the most august aspect of nat- 
ure. The cynical indifference of the sea to 
the merits of human suffering and courage, 
laid bare in this ridiculous, panic-tainted 
performance extorted from the dire ex- 
tremity of nine good and honorable seamen, 
revolted me. I saw the duplicity of the 
sea's most tender mood. It was so because 
it could not help itself, but the awed respect 
of the early days was gone. I felt ready to 
smile bitterly at its enchanting charm and 
glare viciously at its furies. In a moment, 
before we shoved off, I had looked coolly at 
the life of my choice. Its illusions were 
gone, but its fascinations remained. I had 
become a seaman at last. 

We pulled hard for a quarter of an hour, 
then laid on our oars waiting for our ship. 
She was coming down on us with swelling 

238 



Initiation 

sails, looking delicately tall and exquisitely- 
noble through the mist. The captain of the 
brig, who sat in the stern-sheets by my side 
with his face in his hands, raised his head 
and began to speak with a sort of sombre 
volubility. They had lost their masts and 
sprung a leak in a hurricane; drifted for 
weeks, always at the pumps, met more bad 
weather; the ships they sighted failed to 
make them out, the leak gained upon them 
slowly, and the seas had left them nothing 
to make a raft of. It was very hard to see 
ship after ship pass by at a distance, "as if 
everybody had agreed that we must be left 
to drown," he added. But they went on 
trying to keep the brig afloat as long as pos- 
sible, and working the pumps constantly on 
insufficient food, mostly raw, till ' ' yesterday 
evening, " he continued, monotonously, "just 
as the sun went down, the men's hearts 
broke." 

He made an almost imperceptible pause 
here, and went on again with exactly the 
same intonation : 

'They told me the brig could not be 
saved, and they thought they had done 

2 39 



The Mirror of the Sea 

enough for themselves. I said nothing to 
that. It was true. It was no mutiny. I 
had nothing to say to them. They lay 
about aft all night, as still as so many dead 
men. I did not lie down. I kept a look- 
out. When the first light came I saw your 
ship at once. I waited for more light; the 
breeze began to fail on my face. Then I 
shouted out as loud as I was able, "Look at 
that ship!" but only two men got up very 
slowly and came to me. At first only we 
three stood alone, for a long time, watching 
you coming down to us, and feeling the 
breeze drop to a calm almost; but after- 
wards others, too, rose, one after another, 
and by-and-by I had all my crew behind me. 
I turned round and said to them that they 
could see the ship was coming our way, but 
in this small breeze she might come too late 
after all, unless we turned to and tried to 
keep the brig afloat long enough to give you 
time to save us all. I spoke like that to 
them, and then I gave the command to man 
the pumps." 

He gave the command, and gave the ex- 
ample, too, by going himself to the handles, 

240 



Initiation 

but it seems that these men did actually 
hang back for a moment, looking at one 
another dubiously before they followed him. 
"He! he! he!" He broke out into a most 
unexpected, imbecile, pathetic, nervous little 
giggle. "Their hearts were broken so! They 
had been played with too long," he explain- 
ed apologetically, lowering his' eyes, and be- 
came silent. 

Twenty - five years is a long time — a 
quarter of a century is a dim and distant 
past; but to this day I remember the dark- 
brown feet, hands, and faces of two of these 
men whose hearts had been broken by the 
sea. They were lying very still on their 
sides on the bottom boards between the 
thwarts, curled up like dogs. My boat's 
crew, leaning over the looms of their oars, 
stared and listened as if at the play. The 
master of the brig looked up suddenly to 
ask me what day it was. 

They had lost the date. When I told 
him it was Sunday, the 2 2d, he frowned, 
making some mental calculation, then nod- 
ded twice sadly to himself, staring at noth- 
ing. 

241 



The Mirror of the Sea 

His aspect was miserably unkempt and 
wildly sorrowful. Had it not been for the 
unquenchable candor of his blue eyes, whose 
unhappy, tired glance every moment sought 
his abandoned, sinking brig, as if it could 
find rest nowhere else, he would have ap- 
peared mad. But he was too simple to go 
mad, too simple with that manly simplicity 
which alone can bear men unscathed in 
mind and body through an encounter with 
the deadly playfulness of the sea or with its 
less abominable fury. 

Neither angry nor playful nor smiling, it 
enveloped our distant ship growing bigger 
as she neared us, our boats with the rescued 
men and the dismantled hull of the brig we 
were leaving behind, in the large and placid 
embrace of its quietness, half -lost in the fair 
haze, as if in a dream of infinite and faithful 
clemency. There was no frown, no wrinkle 
on its face, not a ripple. And the run of 
the slight swell was so smooth that it re- 
sembled the graceful undulation of a piece 
of shimmering gray silk shot with tender 
green. We pulled an easy stroke; but 
when the master of the brig, after a glance 

242 



Initiation 

over his shoulder, stood up with a low ex- 
clamation, my men feathered their oars in- 
stinctively, without an order, and the boat 
lost her way. 

He was steadying himself on my shoulder 
with a strong grip, while his other arm, flung 
up rigidly, pointed a denunciatory finger at 
the immense tranquillity of the ocean. After 
his first exclamation, which stopped the 
swing of our oars, he made no sound, but 
his whole attitude seemed to cry out an in- 
dignant "Behold!" ... I could not imagine 
what vision of evil had come to him. I was 
startled, and the amazing energy of his 
immobilized gesture made my heart beat 
faster with the anticipation of something 
monstrous and unsuspected. The stillness 
around us became crushing. 

For a moment the succession of silky un- 
dulations ran on innocently. I saw each of 
them swell up the misty line of the horizon, 
far, far away beyond the derelict brig, and 
the next moment, with a slight, friendly toss 
of our boat, it had passed under us and was 
gone. The lulling cadence of the rise and 
fall, the invariable gentleness of this irre- 

243 



The Mirror of the Sea 

sistible force, the great charm of the deep 
waters, warmed my breast deliriously, like 
the subtle poison of a love-potion. But all 
this lasted only a few soothing seconds be- 
fore I jumped up, too, making the boat roll 
like the veriest landlubber. 

Something startling, mysterious, hastily 
confused, was taking place. I watched it 
with incredulous and fascinated awe, as 
one watches the confused, swift movements 
of some deed of violence done in the dark. 
As if at a given signal, the run of the 
smooth undulations seemed checked sudden- 
ly around the brig. By a strange optical de- 
lusion the whole sea appeared to rise upon 
her in one overwhelming heave of its silky 
surface, where in one spot a smother of 
foam broke out ferociously. And then the 
effort subsided. It was all over, and the 
smooth swell ran on as before from the 
horizon in uninterrupted cadence of motion, 
passing under us wjth a slight, friendly toss 
of our boat. Far away, where the brig had 
been, an angry white stain undulating 01 
the surface of steely-gray waters, shot with 
gleams of green, diminished swiftly, without 

244 



Initiation 

a hiss, like a patch of pure snow melting in 
the sun. And the great stillness after this 
initiation into the sea's implacable hate 
seemed full of dread thoughts and shadows 
of disaster. 

"Gone!" ejaculated from the depths of 
his chest my bowman in a final tone. He 
spat in his hands, and took a better grip on 
his oar. The captain of the brig lowered 
his rigid arm slowly, and looked at our faces 
in a solemnly conscious silence, which called 
upon us to share in his simple-minded, mar- 
velling awe. All at once he sat down by 
my side, and leaned forward earnestly at 
my boat's crew, who, swinging together in a 
long, easy stroke, kept their eyes fixed upon 
him faithfully. 

"No ship could have done so well," he 
addressed them firmly, after a moment of 
strained silence, during which he seemed 
with trembling lips to seek for words fit to 
bear such high testimony. "She was small, 
but she was good. I had no anxiety. She 
was strong. Last voyage I had my wife 
and two children in her. No other ship 
could have stood so long the weather she 

245 



The Mirror of the Sea 

had to live through for days and days be- 
fore we got dismasted a fortnight ago. She 
was fairly worn out, and that's all. You 
may believe me. She lasted under us for 
days and days, but she could not last for- 
ever. It was long enough. I am glad it is 
over. No better ship was ever left to sink 
at sea on such a day as this." 

He was competent to pronounce the fu- 
nereal oration of a ship, this son of ancient 
sea-folk, whose national existence, so little 
stained by the excesses of manly virtues, 
had demanded nothing but the merest foot- 
hold from the earth. By the merits of his 
sea-wise forefathers and by the artlessness 
of his heart, he was made fit to deliver 
this excellent discourse. There was nothing 
wanting in its orderly arrangement — neither 
piety nor faith, nor the tribute of praise due 
to the worthy dead, with the edifying re- 
cital of their achievement. She had lived, 
he had loved her; she had suffered, and he 
was glad she was at rest. It was an excel- 
lent discourse. And it was orthodox, too, 
in its fidelity to the cardinal article of a sea- 
man's faith, of which it was a single-minded 

246 



Initiation 

confession. "Ships are all right." They 
are. They who live with the sea have got 
to hold by that creed first and last; and it 
came to me, as I glanced at him sideways, 
that some men were not altogether un- 
worthy in honor and conscience to pro- 
nounce the funereal eulogium of a ship's 
constancy in life and death. 

After this, sitting by my side with his 
loosely clasped hands hanging between his 
knees, he uttered no word, made no move- 
ment till the shadow of our ship's sails fell 
on the boat, when, at the loud cheer greeting 
the return of the victors with their prize, he 
lifted up his troubled face with a faint smile 
of pathetic indulgence. This smile of the 
worthy descendant of the most ancient sea- 
folk whose audacity and hardihood had left 
no trace of greatness and glory upon the 
waters, completed the cycle of my initiation. 
There was an infinite depth of hereditary 
wisdom in its pitying sadness. It made the 
hearty bursts of cheering sound like a child- 
ish noise of triumph. Our crew shouted 
with immense confidence — honest souls! As 
if anybody could ever make sure of having 

247 



The Mirror of the Sea 

prevailed against the sea, which has be- 
trayed so many ships of great "name," so 
many proud men, so many towering ambi- 
tions of fame, power, wealth, greatness! 

As I brought the boat under the falls my 
captain, in high good - humor, leaned over, 
spreading his red and freckled elbows on 
the rail, and called down to me sarcastically, 
out of the depths of his cynic philosopher's 
beard : 

" So you have brought the boat back after 
all, have you?" 

Sarcasm was "his way," and the most 
that can be said for it is that it was natural. 
This did not make it lovable. But it is de- 
corous and expedient to fall in with one's 
commander's way. "Yes. I brought the 
boat back all right, sir," I answered. And 
the good man believed me. It was not for 
him to discern upon me the marks of my 
recent initiation. And yet I was not ex- 
actly the same youngster who had taken 
the boat away — all impatience for a race 
against Death, with the prize of nine men's 
lives at the end. 

Already I looked with other eyes upon 

248 



Initiation 

the sea. I knew it capable of betraying the 
generous ardor of youth as implacably as, 
indifferent to evil and good, it would have 
betrayed the basest greed or the noblest 
heroism. My conception of its magnani- 
mous greatness was gone. And I looked 
upon the true sea — the sea that plays with 
men till their hearts are broken, and wears 
stout ships to death. Nothing can touch 
the brooding bitterness of its heart. Open 
to all and faithful to none, it exercises its 
fascination for the undoing of the best. To 
love it is not well. It knows no bond of 
plighted troth, no fidelity to misfortune, to 
long companionship, to long devotion. The 
promise it holds out perpetually is very 
great; but the only secret of its possession 
is strength, strength — the jealous, sleepless 
strength of a man guarding a coveted treas- 
ure within his gates. 




The Nursery of the Craft 



!HE cradle of over -sea traffic 
and of the art of naval com- 
bats, the Mediterranean, apart 
from all the associations of ad- 
venture and glory, the common 
heritage of all mankind, makes a tender ap- 
peal to a seaman. It has sheltered the in- 
fancy of his craft. He looks upon it as a 
man may look at a vast nursery in an old, 
old mansion where innumerable generations 
of his own people have learned to walk. I 
say his own people because, in a sense, all 
sailors belong to one family: all are de- 
scended from that adventurous and shaggy 
ancestor who, bestriding a shapeless log and 
paddling with a crooked branch, accom- 
plished the first coasting-trip in a sheltered 
bay ringing with the admiring howls of his 
tribe. It is a matter of regret that all those 

250 



The Nursery of the Craft 

brothers in craft and feeling, whose genera- 
tions have learned to walk a ship's deck in 
that nursery, have been also more than once 
fiercely engaged in cutting one another's 
throats there. But life, apparently, has 
such exigencies. Without human propensity 
to murder and other sorts of unrighteousness 
there would have been no historical heroism. 
It is a consoling reflection. And then, if one 
examines impartially the deeds of violence, 
they appear of but small consequence. 
From Salamis to Actium, through Lepanto 
and the Nile to the naval massacre of 
Navarino, not to mention other armed en- 
counters of lesser interest, all the blood he- 
roically spilled into the Mediterranean has 
not stained with a single trail of purple the 
deep azure of its classic waters. 

Of course, it may be argued that battles 
have shaped the destiny of mankind. The 
question whether they have shaped it well 
would remain open, however. But it would 
be hardly worth discussing. It is very 
probable that, had the battle of Salamis 
never been fought, the face of the world 
would have been much as we behold it now, 
*7 251 



The Mirror of the Sea 

fashioned by the mediocre inspiration and 
the short-sighted labors of men. From a 
long and miserable experience of suffering, 
injustice, disgrace and aggression the nations 
of the earth are mostly swayed by fear — 
fear of the sort that a little cheap oratory 
turns easily to rage, hate, and violence. In- 
nocent, guileless fear has been the cause of 
many wars. Not, of course, the fear of war 
itself, which, in the evolution of sentiments 
and ideas, has come to be regarded at last 
as a half -mystic and glorious ceremony with 
certain fashionable rites and preliminary in- 
cantations, wherein the conception of its 
true nature has been lost. To apprehend 
the true aspect, force, and morality of war 
as a natural function of mankind one re- 
quires a feather in the hair and a ring in the 
nose, or, better still, teeth filed to a point 
and a tattooed breast. Unfortunately, a 
return to such simple ornamentation is im- 
possible. We are bound to the chariot of 
progress. There is no going back; and, as 
bad luck would have it, our civilization, 
which has done so much for the comfort 
and adornment of our bodies and the eleva- 

252 



The Nursery of the Craft 

tion of our minds, has made lawful killing 
frightfully and needlessly expensive. 

The whole question of improved arma- 
ments has been approached by the govern- 
ments of the earth in a spirit of nervous and 
unreflecting haste, whereas the right way 
was lying plainly before them, and had only 
to be pursued with calm determination. 
The learned vigils and labors of a certain 
class of inventors should have been rewarded 
with honorable liberality as justice demand- 
ed; and the bodies of the inventors should 
have been blown to pieces by means of their 
own perfected explosives and improved 
weapons with extreme publicity as the com- 
monest prudence dictated. By this meth- 
od the ardor of research in that direction 
would have been restrained without in- 
fringing the sacred privileges of science. 
For the lack of a little cool thinking in our 
guides and masters this course has not been 
followed, and a beautiful simplicity has 
been sacrificed for no real advantage. A 
frugal mind cannot defend itself from con- 
siderable bitterness when reflecting that at 
the battle of Actium (which was fought for 

2 53 



The Mirror of the Sea 

no less a stake than the dominion of the 
world) the fleet of Octavianus Caesar and 
the fleet of Antonius, including the Egyptian 
division and Cleopatra's galley with purple 
sails, probably cost less than two modern 
battle-ships, or, as the modern naval book- 
jargon has it, two naval units. But no 
amount of lubberly book- jargon can disguise 
a fact well calculated to afflict the soul of 
every sound economist. It is not likely 
that the Mediterranean will ever behold a 
battle with a greater issue; but when the 
time comes for another historical fight its 
bottom will be enriched as never before by 
a quantity of jagged scrap-iron, paid for at 
pretty nearly its weight of gold by the de- 
luded populations inhabiting the isles and 
continents of this planet. 



Happy he who, like Ulysses, has made an 
adventurous voyage; and there is no such 
sea for adventurous voyages as the Mediter- 
ranean — the inland sea which the ancients 
looked upon as so vast and so full of won- 

254 



The Nursery of the Craft 

ders. And, indeed, it was terrible and 
wonderful; for it is we alone who, swayed 
by the audacity of our minds and the 
tremors of our hearts, are the sole arti- 
sans of all the wonder and romance of the 
world. 

It was for the Mediterranean sailors that 
fair - haired sirens sang among the black 
rocks seething in white foam and mysterious 
voices spoke in the darkness above the 
moving wave — voices menacing, seductive, 
or prophetic, like that voice heard at, the 
beginning of the Christian era by the master 
of an African vessel in the Gulf of Syrta, 
whose calm nights are full of strange mur- 
murs and flitting shadows. It called him 
by name, bidding him go and tell all men 
that the great god Pan was dead. But the 
great legend of the Mediterranean, the 
legend of traditional song and grave history, 
lives, fascinating and immortal, in our 
minds. 

The dark and fearful sea of the subtle 
Ulysses's wanderings, agitated by the wrath 
of Olympian gods, harboring on its isles the 
fury of strange monsters and the wiles of 

255 



The Mirror of the Sea 

strange women; the highway of heroes and 
sages, of warriors, pirates, and saints; the 
workaday sea of Carthaginian merchants 
and the pleasure-lake of the Roman Caesars, 
claims the veneration of every seaman as 
the historical home of that spirit of open 
defiance against the great waters of the 
earth which is the very soul of his calling. 
Issuing thence to the west and south, as a 
youth leaves the shelter of his parental 
house, this spirit found the way to the In- 
dies, discovered the coasts of a new con- 
tinent, and traversed at last the immensity 
of the great Pacific, rich in groups of islands 
remote and mysterious, like the constella- 
tions of the sky. 

The first impulse of navigation took its 
visible form in that tideless basin freed 
from hidden shoals and treacherous cur- 
rents, as if in tender regard for the infancy 
of the art. The steep shores of the Mediter- 
ranean favored the beginners in one of hu- 
manity's most daring enterprises, and the 
enchanting inland sea of classic adventure 
has led mankind gently from headland to 
headland, from bay to bay, from island to 

256 



The Nursery of the Craft 

island, out into the promise of world-wide 
oceans beyond the Pillars of Hercules. 



The charm of the Mediterranean dwells in 
the unforgettable flavor of my early days, 
and to this hour this sea, upon which the 
Romans alone ruled without dispute, has 
kept for me the fascination of youthful ro- 
mance. The very first Christmas night I 
ever spent away from land was employed in 
running before a Gulf of Lyons gale, which 
made the old ship groan in every timber as 
she skipped before it over the short seas un- 
til we brought her to, battered and out of 
breath, under the lee of Majorca, where the 
smooth water was torn by fierce cat's-paws 
under a very stormy sky. 

Wo — or, rather, they, for I had hardly 
had two glimpses of salt-water in my life till 
then — kept her standing off and on all that 
day, while I listened for the first time with 
the curiosity of my tender years to the song 
of the wind in a ship's rigging. The mo- 
notonous and vibrating note was destined 

2 57 



The Mirror of the Sea 

to grow into the intimacy of the heart, pass 
into blood and bone, accompany the thoughts 
and acts of two full decades, remain to 
haunt like a reproach the peace of the quiet 
fireside, and enter into the very texture of 
respectable dreams dreamed safely under a 
roof of rafters and tiles. The wind was 
fair, but that day we ran no more. 

The thing (I will not call her a ship twice 
in the same half -hour) leaked. She leaked 
fully, generously, overflowingly, all over — 
like a basket. I took an enthusiastic part 
in the excitement caused by that last in- 
firmity of noble ships, without concerning 
myself much with the why or the wherefore. 
The surmise of my maturer years is that, 
bored by her interminable life, the vener- 
able antiquity was simply yawning with 
ennui at every seam. But at the time I did. 
not know; I knew generally very little, and 
least of all what I was doing in that galere. 

I remember that, exactly as in the comedy 
of Moliere, my uncle asked the precise 
question in the very words— not of my con- 
fidential valet, however, but across great 
distances of land, in a letter whose mocking 

258 



The Nursery of the Craft 

but indulgent turn ill concealed his almost 
paternal anxiety. I fancy I tried to convey 
to him my (utterly unfounded) impression 
that the West Indies awaited my coming. 
I had to go there. It was a sort of mystic 
conviction — something in the nature of a 
call. But it was difficult to state intelli- 
gibly the grounds of this belief to that man 
of rigorous logic, if of infinite charity. 

The truth must have been that, all un- 
versed in the arts of the wily Greek, the de- 
ceiver of gods, the lover of strange women, 
the evoker of blood - thirsty shades, I yet 
longed for the beginning of my own obscure 
"Odyssey," which, as was proper for a 
modern, should unroll its wonders and ter- 
rors beyond the Pillars of Hercules. The 
disdainful ocean did not open wide to swal- 
low up my audacity, though the ship, the 
ridiculous and ancient galere of my folly, 
the old, weary, disenchanted sugar- wagon, 
seemed extremely disposed to open out and 
swallow up as much salt-water as she could 
hold. This, if less grandiose, would have 
been as final a catastrophe. 

But no catastrophe occurred. I lived to 

259 



The Mirror of the Sea 

watch on a strange shore a black and youth- 
ful Nausicaa, with a joyous train of at- 
tendant maidens, carrying baskets of linen 
to a clear stream overhung by the heads of 
slender palm - trees. The vivid colors of 
their draped raiment and the gold of their 
ear-rings invested with a barbaric and re- 
gal magnificence their figures, stepping out 
freely in a shower of broken sunshine. The 
whiteness of their teeth was still more daz- 
zling than the splendor of jewels at their 
ears. The shaded side of the ravine gleamed 
with their smiles. They were as unabashed 
as so many princesses, but, alas! not one of 
them was the daughter of a jet-black sover- 
eign. Such was my abominable luck in be- 
ing born by a mere hair-breadth of twenty- 
five centuries too late into a world where 
kings have been growing scarce with scan- 
dalous rapidity, while the few who remain 
have adopted the uninteresting manners 
and customs of simple millionaires. Obvi- 
ously, it was a vain hope in 187- to see the 
ladies of a royal household walk in checkered 
sunshine, with baskets of linen on their 
heads, to the banks of a clear stream over- 

260 



The Nursery of the Craft 

hung by the starry fronds of palm-trees. It 
was a vain hope. If I did not ask myself 
whether, limited by such discouraging im- 
possibilities, life were still worth living, it 
was only because I had then before me sev- 
eral other pressing questions, some of which 
have remained unanswered to this day. 
The resonant, laughing voices of these gor- 
geous maidens scared away the multitude 
of humming - birds, whose delicate wings 
wreathed with the mist of their vibration 
the tops of flowering bushes. 

No, they were not princesses. Their un- 
restrained laughter filling the hot, fern-clad 
ravine had a soulless limpidity, as of wild, 
inhuman dwellers in tropical woodlands. 
Following the example of certain prudent 
travellers, I withdrew unseen — and returned, 
not much wiser, to the Mediterranean, the 
sea of classic adventures. 



The "Tremolino' 




IT was written that there, in the 
nursery of our navigating an- 
cestors, I should learn to walk 
in the ways of my craft and 
grow in the love of the sea, 
blind as young love often is, but absorbing 
and disinterested as all true love must be. 
I demanded nothing from it — not even ad- 
venture. In this I showed, perhaps, more 
intuitive wisdom than high self-denial. No 
adventure ever came to one for the asking. 
He who starts on a deliberate quest of ad- 
venture goes forth but to gather dead-sea 
fruit, unless, indeed, he be beloved of the 
gods and great among heroes, like that most 
excellent cavalier Don Ouixote de la Mancha. 
By us ordinary mortals of a mediocre animus 
that is only too anxious to pass by wicked 
giants for so many honest windmills, ad- 

262 



The "Tremolino" 

ventures are entertained like visiting angels. 
They come upon our complacency unawares. 
As unbidden guests are apt to do, they often 
come at inconvenient times. And we are 
glad to let them go unrecognized, without 
any acknowledgment of so high a favor. 
After many years, on looking back from the 
middle turn of life's way at the events of the 
past, which, like a friendly crowd, seem to 
look sadly after us hastening towards the 
Cimmerian shore, we may see here and 
there, in the gray throng, some figure glow- 
ing with a faint radiance, as though it had 
caught all the light of our already crepuscu- 
lar sky. And by this glow we may recognize 
the faces of our true adventures, of the once 
unbidden guests entertained unawares in 
our young days. 

If the Mediterranean, the venerable (and 
sometimes atrociously ill - tempered) nurse 
of all navigators, was to rock my youth, 
the providing of the cradle necessary for 
that operation was intrusted by fate to the 
most casual assemblage of irresponsible 
young men (all, however, older than my- 
self) that, as if drunk with Provencal sun- 

263 



The Mirror of the Sea 

shine, frittered life away in joyous levity on 
the model of Balzac's Histoire des Treize 
qualified by a dash of romance de cape et 
d'epee. 

She who was my cradle in those years 
hadbeen built on the river of Savona by 
a famous builder of boats, was rigged in 
Corsica by another good man, and was de- 
scribed on her papers as a "tartane" of 
sixty tons. In reality, she was a true 
balancelle, with two short masts raking for- 
ward and two curved yards, each as long as 
her hull ; a true child of the Latin lake, with 
a spread of two enormous sails resembling 
the pointed wings on a sea-bird's slender 
body, and herself, like a bird indeed, skim- 
ming rather than sailing the seas. 

Her name was the Tremolino. How is 
this to be translated? The Quiver erf What 
a name to give the pluckiest little craft that 
ever dipped her sides in angry foam! I had 
felt her, it is true, trembling for nights and 
days together under my feet, but it was 
with the high-strung tenseness of her faith- 
ful courage. In her short but brilliant 
career she has taught me nothing, but she 

264 



The "Tremolino" 

has given me everything. I owe to her the 
awakened love for the sea that, with the 
quivering of her swift little body and the 
humming of the wind under the foot of her 
lateen sails, stole into my heart with a sort 
of gentle violence, and brought my imagina- 
tion under its despotic sway. The Tremo- 
linol To this day I cannot utter or even 
write that name without a strange tighten- 
ing of the breast and the gasp of mingled 
delight and dread of one's first passionate 
experience. 



We four formed (to use a term well un- 
derstood nowadays in every social sphere) a 
■ ' syndicate ' ' owning the Tremolino : a cos- 
mopolitan and astonishing syndicate. And 
we were all ardent Royalists of the snow- 
white Legitimist complexion — Heaven only 
knows why! In all associations of men 
there is generally one who, by the authority 
of age and of a more experienced wisdom, 
imparts a collective character to the whole 
set. If I mention that the oldest of us was 

265 



The Mirror of the Sea 

very old, extremely old — nearly thirty years 
old — and that he used to declare with gal- 
lant carelessness, "I live by my sword," I 
think I have given enough information on 
the score of our collective wisdom. He was 
a North Carolinian gentleman, J. M. K. B. 
were the initials of his name, and he really 
did live by the sword, as far as I know. He 
died by it, too, later on, in a Balkanian 
squabble, in the cause of some Serbs or else 
Bulgarians, who were neither Catholics nor 
gentlemen — at least, not in the exalted 
but narrow sense he attached to that last 
word. 

Poor J. M. K. B., Americain, Catholique, 
et gentilhomme, as he was disposed to de- 
scribe himself in moments of lofty expan- 
sion! Are there still to be found in Europe 
gentlemen keen of face and elegantly slight 
of body, of distinguished aspect, with a fas^ 
cinating drawing-room manner and with a 
dark, fatal glance, who live by their swords, 
I wonder? His family had been ruined in 
the Civil War, I fancy, and seems for a dec- 
ade or so to have led a wandering life in 

the Old World. As to Henry C , the 

266 



The "Tremolino" 

next in age and wisdom of our band, he had 
broken loose from the unyielding rigidity of 
his family, solidly rooted, if I remember 
rightly, in a well-to-do London suburb. 
On their respectable authority he intro- 
duced himself meekly to strangers as a 
''black sheep." I have never seen a more 
guileless specimen of an outcast. Never. 

However, his people had the grace to send 
him a little money now and then. Enam- 
ored of the south, of Provence, of its peo- 
ple, its life, its sunshine and its poetry, nar- 
row-chested, tall, and short-sighted, he strode 
along the streets and the lanes, his long feet 
projecting far in advance of his body, and 
his white nose and gingery mustache buried 
in an open book: for he had the habit of 
reading as he walked. How he avoided fall- 
ing into precipices, off the quays, or down 
staircases is a great mystery. The sides of 
his overcoat bulged out with pocket-editions 
of various poets. When not engaged in 
reading Virgil, Homer, or Mistral, in parks, 
restaurants, streets, and suchlike public 
places, he indited sonnets (in French) to the 
eyes, ears, chin, hair, and other visible per- 
18 267 



The Mirror of the Sea 

fections of a nymph called Therese, the 
daughter, truth compels me to state, of a 
certain Madame Leonore who kept a small 
cafe for sailors in one of the narrowest 
streets of the old town. 

No more charming face, clear-cut like an 
antique gem, and delicate in coloring like 
the petal of a flower, had ever been set on, 
alas! a somewhat squat body. He read his 
verses aloud to her in the very cafe with 
the innocence of a little child and the vanity 
of a poet. We followed him there willingly 
enough, if only to watch the divine Therese 
laugh, under the vigilant black eyes of 
Madame Leonore, her mother. She laughed 
very prettily, not so much at the sonnets, 
which she could not but esteem, as at poor 
Henry's French accent, which was unique, 
resembling the warbling of birds, if birds 
ever warbled with a stuttering, nasal in- 
tonation. 

Our third partner was Roger P. de la 

S , the most Scandinavian-looking of 

Provencal squires, fair, and six feet high, as 
became a descendant of sea-roving North- 
men, authoritative, incisive, wittily scorn- 

268 



The "Tremolino" 

fill, with a comedy in three acts in his 
pocket, and in his breast a heart blighted by 
a hopeless passion for his beautiful cousin, 
married to a wealthy hide and tallow mer- 
chant. He used to take us to lunch at their 
house without ceremony. I admired the 
good lady's sweet patience. The husband 
was a conciliatory soul, with a great fund of 
resignation, which he expended on "Roger's 
friends." I suspect he was secretly horrified 
at these invasions. But it was a Car list 
salon, and as such we were made welcome. 
The possibility of raising Catalonia in the 
interest of the Rey netto, who had just then 
crossed the Pyrenees, was much discussed 
there. 

Don Carlos, no doubt, must have had 
many queer friends (it is the common lot of 
all pretenders), but among them none more 
extravagantly fantastic than the Tremolino 
Syndicate, which used to meet in a tavern 
on the quays of the old port. The antique 
city of Massilia had surely never, since the 
days of the earliest Phoenicians, known an 
odder set of ship-owners. We met to dis- 
cuss and settle the plan of operations for 

269 



The Mirror of the Sea 

each voyage of the Tremolino. In these 
operations a banking-house, too, was con- 
cerned — a very respectable banking-house. 
But I am afraid I shall end by saying too 
much. Ladies, too, were concerned (I am 
really afraid I am saying too much) — all 
sorts of ladies, some old enough to know 
better than to put their trust in princes, 
others young and full of illusions. 

One of these last was extremely amusing 
in the imitations she gave us, in confidence, 
of various highly placed personages she was 
perpetually rushing off to Paris to interview 
in the interests of the cause — Por el Key I 
For she was a Carlist, and of Basque blood 
at that, with something of a lioness in the 
expression of her courageous face (especially 
when she let her hair down), and with the 
volatile little soul of a sparrow dressed in 
fine Parisian feathers, which had the trick 
of coming off disconcertingly at unexpected 
moments. 

But her imitations of a Parisian person- 
age, very highly placed, indeed, as she rep- 
resented him standing in the corner of a 
room with his face to the wall, rubbing the 

270 



The "Tremolino" 

back of his head and moaning helplessly, 
"Rita, you are the death of me," were 
enough to make one (if young and free from 
cares) split one's sides laughing. She had 
an uncle still living, a very effective Carlist, 
too, the priest of a little mountain parish in 
Guipuzcoa. As the sea - going member of 
the syndicate (whose plans depended greatly 
on Dona Rita's information), I used to be 
charged with humbly affectionate messages 
for the old man. These messages I was sup- 
posed to deliver to the Arragonese muleteers 
(who were sure to await at certain times the 
Tremolino in the neighborhood of the Gulf 
of Rosas) , for faithful transportation inland, 
together with the various unlawful goods 
landed secretly from under the Tremolino'' 's 
hatches. 

Well, now, I have really let out too much 
(as I feared I should in the end) as to the 
usual contents of my sea-cradle. But let it 
stand. And if anybody remarks cynically 
that I must have been a promising infant in 
those days, let that stand, too. I am con- 
cerned but for the good name of the Tremo- 
lino, and I affirm that a ship is ever guilt- 

271 



The Mirror of the Sea 

less of the sins, transgressions, and follies of 
her men. 



It was not Tremolino's fault that the syn- 
dicate depended so much on the wit and 
wisdom and the information of Dona Rita. 
She had taken a little furnished house on 
the Prado for the good of the cause — Por el 
Rey! She was always taking little houses 
for somebody's good, for the sick or the 
sorry, for broken-down artists, cleaned-out 
gamblers, temporarily unlucky speculators 
— vieux amis — old friends, as she used to 
explain apologetically, with a shrug of her 
fine shoulders. 

Whether Don Carlos was one of the "old 
friends," too, it's hard to say. More un- 
likely things have been heard of in smoking- 
rooms. All I know is that one evening, en- 
tering incautiously the salon of the little 
house just after the news of a considerable 
Carlist success had reached the faithful, I 
was seized round the neck and waist and 
whirled recklessly three times round the 

272 



The "Tremolino" 

room, to the crash of upsetting furniture 
and the humming of a valse tune in a warm, 
contralto voice. 

When released from the dizzy embrace, I 
sat down on the carpet — suddenly, without 
affectation. In this unpretentious attitude 
I became aware that J. M. K. B. had fol- 
lowed me into the room, elegant, fatal, cor- 
rect and severe in a white tie and large shirt- 
front. In answer to his politely sinister, 
prolonged glance of inquiry, I overheard 
Dona Rita murmuring, with some confusion 
and annoyance, "Vous etes bete mon cher. 
Voyons ! Ca u'a aucune consequence. ' ' Well 
content in this case to be of no particular 
consequence, I had already about me the ele- 
ments of some worldly sense. 

Rearranging my collar, which, truth to 
say, ought to have been a round one above 
a short jacket, but was not, I observed, 
felicitously, that I had come to say good- 
bye, being ready to go off to sea that very 
night with the Tremolino. Our hostess, 
slightly panting yet, and just a shade di- 
shevelled, turned tartly upon J. M. K. B., 
desiring to know when he would be ready to 

273 



The Mirror of the Sea 

go off by the Tremolino, or in any other way, 
in order to join the royal headquarters. 
Did he intend, she asked, ironically, to wait 
for the very eve of the entry into Madrid? 
Thus by a judicious exercise of tact and as- 
perity we re-established the atmospheric 
equilibrium of the room long before I left a 
little before midnight, now tenderly recon- 
ciled, to walk down to the harbor and hail 
the Tremolino by the usual soft whistle from 
the edge of the quay. It was our signal, 
invariably heard by the ever-watchful Dom- 
inic, the padrone. 

He would raise a lantern silently to light 
my steps along the narrow, springy plank of 
our primitive gangway. "And so we are 
going off," he would murmur directly my 
foot touched the deck. I was the harbinger 
of sudden departures, but there was nothing 
in the world sudden enough to take Dominic 
unawares. His thick black mustaches, curl- 
ed every morning with hot tongs by the 
barber at the corner of the quay, seemed to 
hide a perpetual smile. But nobody, I be- 
lieve, had ever seen the true shape of his 
lips. From the slow, imperturbable gravity 

274 



The "Tremolino" 

of that broad-chested man you would think 
he had never smiled in his life. In his eyes 
lurked a look of perfectly remorseless irony, 
as though he had been provided with an ex- 
tremely experienced soul; and the slightest 
distension of his nostrils would give to his 
bronzed face a look of extraordinary bold- 
ness. This was the only play of feature of 
which he seemed capable, being a southern- 
er of a concentrated, deliberate type. His 
ebony hair curled slightly on the temples. 
He may have been forty years old, and he 
was a great voyager on the inland sea. 

Astute and ruthless, he could have rivalled 
in resource the unfortunate son of Laertes 
and Anticlea. If he did not pit his craft 
and audacity against the very gods, it is 
only because the Olympian gods are dead. 
Certainly no woman could frighten him. A 
one-eyed giant would have had not the 
ghost of a chance against Dominic Cervoni, 
of Corsica, not Ithaca; and no king, son of 
kings, but of very respectable family — au- 
thentic Caporali, he affirmed. But that is 
as it may be. The Caporali families date 
back to the twelfth century. 

275 



The Mirror of the Sea 

For want of more exalted adversaries, 
Dominic turned his audacity, fertile in im- 
pious stratagems, against the powers of the 
earth, as represented by the institution of 
custom-houses and every mortal belonging 
thereto — scribes, officers, and guardacostas 
afloat and ashore. He was the very man 
for us, this modern and unlawful wanderer 
with his own legend of loves, dangers, and 
bloodshed. He told us bits of it sometimes 
in measured, ironic tones. He spoke Cata- 
lonian, the Italian of Corsica, and the French 
of Provence with the same easy naturalness. 
Dressed in shore togs, a white starched shirt, 
black jacket, and round hat, as I took him 
once to see Dona Rita, he was extremely 
presentable. He could make himself in- 
teresting by a tactful and rugged reserve set 
off by a grim, almost imperceptible, playful- 
ness of tone and manner. 

He had the physical assurance of strong- 
hearted men. After half an hour's inter- 
view in the dining-room, during which they 
got in touch with each other in an amazing 
way, Rita told us in her best grande-dame 
manner: "Mais il est parfait, cet homme." 

276 



The "Tremolino 



a 



He was perfect. On board the Tremolino, 
wrapped up in a black cab an, the picturesque 
cloak of Mediterranean seamen, with those 
massive mustaches and his remorseless eyes 
set off by the shadow of the deep hood, he 
looked piratical and monkish and darkly 
initiated into the most awful mysteries of 
the sea. 



Anyway, he was perfect, as Dona Rita 
had declared. The only thing unsatisfac- 
tory (and even inexplicable) about our 
Dominic was his nephew Cesar. It was 
startling to see a desolate expression of 
shame veil the remorseless audacity in the 
eyes of that man superior to all scruples and 
terrors. 

"I would never have dared to bring him 
on board your balancelle," he once apolo- 
gized to me. ' ' But what am I to do ? His 
mother is dead, and my brother has gone 
into the bush." 

In this way I learned that our Dominic 
had a brother. As to "going into the 

277 



The Mirror of the Sea 

bush," this only means that a man has done 
his duty successfully in the pursuit of a 
hereditary vendetta. The feud which had 
existed for ages between the families of 
Cervoni and Brunaschi was so old that it 
seemed to have smouldered out at last. 
One evening Pietro Brunaschi, after a 
laborious day among his olive-trees, sat on 
a chair against the wall of his house with a 
bowl of broth on his knees and a piece of 
bread in his hand. Dominic's brother, go- 
ing home with a gun on his shoulder, found 
a sudden offence in this sight of content and 
rest so obviously calculated to awaken the 
feelings of hatred and revenge. He and 
Pietro had never had any personal quarrel; 
but, as Dominic explained, ''all our dead 
cried out to him." He shouted from be- 
hind a wall of stones, "Oh, Pietro! Behold 
what is coming!" And as the other looked 
up innocently he took aim at the forehead 
and squared the old vendetta account so 
neatly that, according to Dominic, the dead 
man continued to sit with the bowl of broth 
on his knees and the piece of bread in his 
hand. 

278 



The "Tremolino" 

This is why — because in Corsica your 
dead will not leave you alone — Dominic's 
brother had to go into the maquis, into the 
bush on the wild mountain- side, to dodge 
the gendarmes for the insignificant remain- 
der of his life, and Dominic had charge of 
his nephew with a mission to make a man 
of him. 

No more unpromising undertaking could 
be imagined. The very material for the 
task seemed wanting. The Cervonis, if not 
handsome men, were good sturdy flesh and 
blood. But this extraordinarily lean and 
livid youth seemed to have no more blood 
in him than a snail. 

"Some cursed witch must have stolen my 
brother's child from the cradle and put that 
spawn of a starved devil in its place," 
Dominic would say to me. "Look at him! 
Just look at him!" 

To look at Cesar was not pleasant. His 
parchment skin, showing dead white on his 
cranium through the thin wisps of dirty 
brown hair, seemed to be glued directly and 
tightly upon his big bones. Without being 
in any way deformed, he was the nearest ap- 

279 



The Mirror of the Sea 

proach which I have ever seen or could im- 
agine to what is commonly understood by 
the word " monster." That the source of 
the effect produced was really moral I have 
no doubt. An utterly, hopelessly depraved 
nature was expressed in physical terms, that 
taken each separately had nothing posi- 
tively startling. Ycu imagined him clam- 
mily cold to the touch, like a snake. The 
slightest reproof, the most mild and justifi- 
able remonstrance, would be met by a re- 
sentful glare and an evil shrinking of his 
thin, dry upper lip, a snarl of hate to which 
he generally added the agreeable sound of 
grinding teeth. 

It was for this venomous performance 
rather than for his lies, impudence, and 
laziness that his uncle used to knock him 
down. It must not be imagined that it was 
anything in the nature of a brutal assault. 
Dominic's brawny arm would be seen de- 
scribing deliberately an ample horizontal 
gesture, a dignified sweep, and Cesar would 
go over suddenly like a ninepin — which was 
funny to see. But, once down, he would 
writhe on the deck, gnashing his teeth in 

280 



The " Tremolino" 

impotent rage — which was pretty horrible 
to behold. And it also happened more than 
once that he would disappear completely — 
which was startling to observe. This is the 
exact truth. Before some of these majestic 
cuffs Cesar would go down and vanish. He 
would vanish heels overhead into open hatch- 
ways, into scuttles, behind up-ended casks, ac- 
cording to the place where he happened to 
come into contact with his uncle's mighty arm. 

Once — it was in the old harbor, just 
before the Tremolino' s last voyage — he van- 
ished thus overboard to my infinite con- 
sternation. Dominic and I had been talk- 
ing business together aft, and Cesar had 
sneaked up behind us to listen, for, among 
his other perfections, he was a consummate 
eavesdropper and spy. At the sound of the 
heavy plop alongside horror held me rooted 
to the spot ; but Dominic stepped quietly to 
the rail and leaned over, waiting for his 
nephew's miserable head to bob up for the 
first time. 

"Ohe, Cesar!" he yelled, contemptuously, 
to the spluttering wretch. ''Catch hold of 
that mooring hawser — charogne!" 

281 



The Mirror of the Sea 

He approached me to resume the inter- 
rupted conversation. 

"What about Cesar?" I asked, anxiously. 

"Canallia! Let him hang there," was his 
answer. And he went on talking over the 
business in hand calmly, while I tried vainly 
to dismiss from my mind the picture of 
Cesar steeped to the chin in the water of 
the old harbor, a decoction of centuries of 
marine refuse. I tried to dismiss it, be- 
cause the mere notion of that liquid made 
me feel very sick. Presently Dominic, hail- 
ing an idle boatman, directed him to go and 
fish his nephew out; and by-and-by Cesar 
appeared walking on board from the quay, 
shivering, streaming with filthy water, with 
bits of rotten straws in his hair and a piece 
of dirty orange-peel stranded on his shoul- 
der. His teeth chattered; his yellow eyes 
squinted balefully at us as he passed for- 
ward. I thought it my duty to remon- 
strate. 

"Why are you always knocking him 
about, Dominic?" I asked. Indeed, I felt 
convinced it was no earthly good — a sheer 
waste of muscular force. 

282 



The "Tremolino' 

"I must try to make a man of him," 
Dominic answered, hopelessly. 

I restrained the obvious retort that in 
this way he ran the risk of making, in the 
words of the immortal Mr. Mantalini, "a 
demnition damp, unpleasant corpse of him." 

"He wants to be a locksmith!" burst out 
Cervoni. "To learn how to pick locks, I 
suppose," he added, with sardonic bitter- 
ness. 

"Why not let him be a locksmith?" I 
ventured. 

"Who would teach him?" he cried. 
"Where could I leave him?" he asked, with 
a drop in his voice; and I had my first 
glimpse of genuine despair. "He steals, 
you know, alas! Par la Madonne! I be- 
lieve he would put poison in your food and 
mine — the viper!" 

He raised his face and both his clinched 
fists slowly to heaven. However, Cesar 
never dropped poison into our cups. One 
cannot be sure, but I fancy he went to work 
in another way. 

This voyage, of which the details need 
not be given, we had to range far afield for 
19 283 



The Mirror of the Sea 

sufficient reasons. Coming up from the 
south to end it with the important and 
really dangerous part of the scheme in hand, 
we found it necessary to look into Barcelona 
for certain definite information. This ap- 
pears like running one's head into the very 
jaws of the lion, but in reality it was not so. 
We had one or two high, influential friends 
there, and many others humble but valu- 
able because bought for good hard cash. 
We were in no danger of being molested ; in- 
deed, the important information reached us 
promptly by the hands of a custom-house 
officer, who came on board full of showy 
zeal to poke an iron rod into the layer of 
oranges which made the visible part of our 
cargo in the hatchway. I forgot to men- 
tion before that the Tremolino was official- 
ly known as a fruit and cork-wood trader. 
The zealous officer managed to slip a useful 
piece of paper into Dominic's hand as he 
went ashore, and a few hours afterwards, 
being off duty, he returned on board again 
athirst for drinks and gratitude. He got 
both as a matter of course. While he sat 
sipping his liqueur in the tiny cabin, Dom- 

284 



The "Tremolino" 

inic plied him with questions as to the 
whereabouts of the guardacostas . The pre- 
ventive service afloat was really the one for 
us to reckon with, and it was material for 
our success and safety to know the exact 
position of the patrol-craft in the neighbor- 
hood. The news could not have been more 
favorable. The officer mentioned a small 
place on the coast some twelve miles off, 
where, unsuspicious and unready, she was 
lying at anchor, with her sails unbent, paint- 
ing yards and scraping spars. Then he left 
us after the usual compliments, smirking 
reassuringly over his shoulder. 

I had kept below pretty close all day 
from excess of prudence. The stake played 
on that trip was big. 

"We are ready to go at once, but for 
Cesar, who has been missing ever since 
breakfast, " announced Dominic to me in 
his slow, grim way. 

Where the fellow had gone, and why, we 
could not imagine. The usual surmises in 
the case of a missing seaman did not apply 
to Cesar *s absence. He was too odious for 
love, friendship, gambling, or even casual 

285 



The Mirror of the Sea 

intercourse. But once or twice he had 
wandered away like this before. 

Dominic went ashore to look for him, but 
returned at the end of two hours alone and 
very angry, as I could see by the token of 
the invisible smile under his mustache be- 
ing intensified. We wondered what had be- 
come of the wretch, and made a hurried in- 
vestigation among our portable property. 
He had stolen nothing. 

"He will be back before long," I said, 
confidently. 

Ten minutes afterwards one of the men 
on deck called out, loudly: 

"I can see him coming.' ' 

Cesar had only his shirt and trousers on. 
He had sold his coat, apparently, for pocket- 
money. 

"You knave!" was all Dominic said, with 
a terrible softness of voice. He restrained 
his choler for a time. "Where have you 
been, vagabond?" he asked, menacingly. 

Nothing would induce Cesar to answer 
that question. It was as if he even dis- 
dained to lie. He faced us, drawing back 
his lips and gnashing his teeth, and did not 

286 



The "Tremolino" 

shrink an inch before the sweep of Dominic's 
arm. He went down as if shot, of course. 
But this time I noticed that, when picking 
himself up, he remained longer than usual 
on all fours, baring his big teeth over his 
shoulder and glaring upward at his uncle 
with a new sort of hate in his round, yellow 
eyes. That permanent sentiment seemed 
pointed at that moment by especial malice 
and curiosity. I was quite interested. If 
he ever manages to put poison in the dishes, 
I thought to myself, this is how he will look 
at us as we sit at our meal. But I did not, 
of course, believe for a moment that he 
would ever put poison in our food. He ate 
the same things himself. Moreover, he had 
no poison. And I could not imagine a 
human being so blinded by cupidity as to 
sell poison to such an atrocious creature. 



We slipped out to sea quietly at dusk, 
and all through the night everything went 
well. The breeze was gusty; a southerly 
blow was making up. It was fair wind for 

287 



The Mirror of the Sea 

our course. Now and then Dominic slowly 
and rhythmically struck his hands togeth- 
er a few times, as if applauding the per- 
formance of the Tremolino. The balancelle 
hummed and quivered as she flew along, 
dancing lightly under our feet. 

At daybreak I pointed out to Dominic, 
among the several sail in view running be- 
fore the gathering storm, one particular ves- 
sel. The press of canvas she carried made 
her loom up high, end-on, like a gray column 
standing motionless directly in our wake. 

"Look at this fellow, Dominic," I said. 
"He seems to be in a hurry." 

The padrone made no remark, but, wrap- 
ping his black cloak close about him, stood 
up to look. His weather-tanned face, framed 
in the hood, had an aspect of authority and 
challenging force, with the deep-set eyes gaz- 
ing far away fixedly, without a wink, like 
the intent, merciless, steady eyes of a sea- 
bird. 

"Chi va piano va sano," he remarked at 
last, with a derisive glance over the side, 
in ironic allusion to our own tremendous 
speed. 

288 



The "Tremolino" 

The Tremolino was doing her best, and 
seemed to hardly touch the great burst of 
foam over which she darted. I crouched 
down again to get some shelter from the 
low bulwark. After more than half an hour 
of swaying immobility expressing a concen- 
trated, breathless watchfulness, Dominic 
sank on the deck by my side. Within the 
monkish cowl his eyes gleamed with a fierce 
expression which surprised me. All he said 
was: 

"He has come out here to wash the new 
paint off his yards, I suppose." 

"What?" I shouted, getting up on my 
knees. "Is she a guardacosta?" 

The perpetual suggestion of a smile under 
Dominic's piratical mustache seemed to be- 
come more accentuated — quite real, grim, 
actually almost visible through the wet and 
uncurled hair. Judging by that symptom, 
he must have been in a towering rage. But 
I could also see that he was puzzled, and 
that discovery affected me disagreeably. 
Dominic puzzled! For a long time, leaning 
against the bulwark, I gazed over the stern 
at the gray column that seemed to stand 

289 



The Mirror of the Sea 

swaying slightly in our wake always at the 
same distance. 

Meanwhile, Dominic, black and cowled, 
sat cross-legged on the deck, with his back 
to the wind, recalling vaguely an Arab chief 
in his burnuss sitting on the sand. Above 
his motionless figure the little cord and 
tassel on the stiff point of the hood swung 
about inanely in the gale. At last I gave up 
facing the wind and rain, and crouched 
down by his side. I was satisfied that the 
sail was a patrol - craft. Her presence was 
not a thing to talk about, but soon, between 
two clouds charged with hail - showers, a 
burst of sunshine fell upon her sails, and 
our men discovered her character for them- 
selves. From that moment I noticed that 
they seemed to take no heed of one another 
or of anything else. They could spare no 
eyes and no thought but for the slight 
column - shape astern of us. Its swaying 
had become perceptible. For a moment she 
remained dazzlingly white, then faded away 
slowly to nothing in a squall, only to re- 
appear again, nearly black, resembling a 
post stuck upright against the slaty back- 

290 



The "Tremolino" 

ground of solid cloud. Since first noticed 
she had not gained on us a foot. 

"She will never catch the Tremolino" I 
said, exultingly. 

Dominic did not look at me. He re- 
marked, absently, but justly, that the heavy 
weather was in our pursuer's favor. She 
was three times our size. What we had to 
do was to keep our distance till dark, which 
we could manage easily, and then haul off to 
seaward and consider the situation. But 
his thoughts seemed to stumble in the dark- 
ness of some not-solved enigma, and soon he 
fell silent. We ran steadily, wing-and-wing. 
Cape San Sebastian nearly ahead seemed to 
recede from us in the squalls of rain, and 
come out again to meet our rush, every time 
more distinct between the showers. 

For my part I was by no means certain 
that this gabelou (as our men alluded to her 
opprobriously) was after us at all. There 
were nautical difficulties in such a view 
which made me express the sanguine opinion 
that she was in all innocence simply chang- 
ing her station. At this Dominic conde- 
scended to turn his head. 

291 



The Mirror of the Sea 

"I tell you she is in chase," he affirmed, 
moodily, after one short glance astern. 

I never doubted his opinion. But with 
all the ardor of a neophyte and the pride of 
an apt learner I was at that time a great 
nautical casuist. 

"What I can't understand," I insisted, 
subtly, "is how on earth, with this wind, 
she has managed to be just where she was 
when we first made her out. It is clear 
that she could not, and did not, gain twelve 
miles on us during the night. And there 
are other impossibilities. ..." 

Dominic had been sitting motionless, like 
an inanimate black cone posed on the stern- 
deck, near the rudder-head, with a small 
tassel fluttering on its sharp point, and for a 
time he preserved the immobility of his 
meditation. Then, bending over with a 
short laugh, he gave my ear the bitter fruit 
of it. He understood everything now per- 
fectly. She was where we had seen her first, 
not because she had caught us up, but be- 
cause we had passed her during the night 
while she was already waiting for us, ho ve- 
to, most likely, on our very track. 

292 






The "Tremolino 



> y 



"Do you understand — already?" Dominic 
muttered, in a fierce undertone. ''Already! 
You know we left a good eight hours before 
we were expected to leave, otherwise she 
would have been in time to lie in wait for 
us on the other side of the Cape, and" — he 
snapped his teeth like a wolf close to my 
face — "and she would have had us like — 
that." 

I saw it all plainly enough now. They 
had eyes in their heads and all their wits 
about them in that craft. We had passed 
them in the dark as they jogged on easily 
towards their ambush with the idea that we 
were yet far behind. At daylight, how- 
ever, sighting a balancelle ahead under a 
press of canvas, they had made sail in chase. 
But if that was so, then — 

Dominic seized my arm. 

"Yes, yes! She came out on an infor- 
mation — do you see it ? — on information. 
. . . We have been sold — betrayed. Why? 
How? What for? We always paid them 
all so well on shore. ... No! But it is my 
head that is going to burst." 

He seemed to choke, tugged at the throat 

2 93 



The Mirror of the Sea 

button of the cloak, jumped up open- 
mouthed as if to hurl curses and denuncia- 
tion, but instantly mastered himself, and, 
wrapping up the cloak closer about him, sat 
down on the deck again as quiet as ever. 

"Yes, it must be the work of some scoun- 
drel ashore,' ' I observed. 

He pulled the edge of the hood well for- 
ward over his brow before he muttered : 

"A scoundrel. . . . Yes. . . . It's evident." 

"Well," I said, "they can't get us, that's 
clear." 

"No," he assented, quietly, "they can- 
not." 

We shaved the Cape very close to avoid 
an adverse current. On the other side, by 
the effect of the land, the wind failed us so 
completely for a moment that the Tremo- 
lino's two great lofty sails hung idle to the 
masts in the thundering uproar of the seas 
breaking upon the shore we had left behind. 
And when the returning gust filled them 
again, we saw with amazement half of the 
new main-sail, which we thought fit to drive 
the boat under before giving way, abso- 
lutely fly out of the bolt-ropes. We lowered 

294 



The "Tremolino" 

the yard at once, and saved it all, but it 
was no longer a sail ; it was only a heap of 
soaked strips of canvas cumbering the deck 
and weighting the craft. Dominic gave the 
order to throw the whole lot overboard. 

' ' I would have had the yard thrown over- 
board, too," he said, leading me aft again, 
"if it had not been for the trouble. Let no 
sign escape you," he continued, lowering his 
voice, "but I am going to tell you some- 
thing terrible. Listen: I have observed 
that the roping stitches on that sail have 
been cut! You hear? Cut with a knife in 
many places. And yet it stood all that 
time. Not enough cut. That flap did it at 
last. What matters it? But look! there's 
treachery seated on this very deck. By 
the horns of the devil! seated here at our 
very backs. Do not turn, signorino." 

We were facing aft then. 

"What's to be done?" I asked, appalled. 

"Nothing. Silence! Be a man, signo- 
rino." 

"What else?" I said. 

To show I could be a man, I resolved to 
utter no sound as long as Dominic himself 

2 95 



The Mirror of the Sea 

had the force to keep his lips closed. Noth- 
ing but silence becomes certain situations. 
Moreover, the experience of treachery seem- 
ed to spread a hopeless drowsiness over my 
thoughts and senses. For an hour or more 
we watched our pursuer surging out near- 
er and nearer from among the squalls that 
sometimes hid her altogether. But even 
when not seen, we felt her there like a knife 
at our throats. She gained on us fright- 
fully. And the Tremolino, in a fierce breeze 
and in much smoother water, swung on 
easily under her one sail, with something 
appallingly careless in the joyous freedom 
of her motion. Another half -hour went by. 
I could not stand it any longer. 

''They will get the poor barky," I stam- 
mered out suddenly, almost on the verge of 
tears. 

Dominic stirred no more than a carving. 
A sense of catastrophic loneliness overcame 
my inexperienced soul. The vision of my 
companions passed before me. The whole 
Royalist gang was in Monte Carlo now, I 
reckoned. And they appeared to me clear- 
cut and very small, with affected voices and 

296 



The "Tremolino" 

stiff gestures, like a procession of rigid mari- 
onettes upon a toy stage. I gave a start. 
What was this? A mysterious, remorseless 
whisper came from within the motionless 
black hood at my side. 

"Ilfautla tuer." 

I heard it very well. 

"What do you say, Dominic ?" I asked, 
moving nothing but my lips. 

And the whisper within the hood repeated 
mysteriously, "She must be killed." 

My heart began to beat violently. 

"That's it," I faltered out. " But how?" 

"You love her well?" 

"I do." 

"Then you must find the heart for that 
work, too. You must steer her yourself, 
and I shall see to it that she dies quickly, 
without leaving as much as a chip be- 
hind." 

"Can you?" I murmured, fascinated by 
the black hood turned immovably over the 
stern, as if in unlawful communion with 
that old sea of magicians, slave - dealers, 
exiles, and warriors, the sea of legends and 
terrors, where the mariners of remote an- 

297 



The Mirror of the Sea 

tiquity used to hear the restless shade 
of an old wanderer weep aloud in the 
dark. 

"I know a rock," whispered the initiated 
voice within the hood secretly. "But — 
caution! It must be done before they per- 
ceive what we are about. Whom can we 
trust now? A knife drawn across the fore- 
halyards would bring the foresail down, and 
put an end to our liberty in twenty minutes. 
And the best of our men may be afraid of 
drowning. There is our little boat, but in 
an affair like this no one can be sure of being 
saved." 

The voice ceased. We had started from 
Barcelona with our dinghy in tow; after- 
wards it was too risky to try to get her in, 
so we let her take her chance of the seas at 
the end of a comfortable scope of rope. 
Many times she had seemed to us com- 
pletely overwhelmed, but soon we would see 
her bob up again on a wave, apparently as 
buoyant and whole as ever. 

"I understand," I said, softly. "Very 
well, Dominic. When?" 

"Not yet. We must get a little more in 

298 



The "Tremolino" 

first," answered the voice from the hood in 
a ghostly murmur. 



It was settled. I had now the courage to 
turn about. Our men crouched about the 
decks here and there with anxious, crest- 
fallen faces, all turned one way to watch 
the chaser. For the first time that morn- 
ing I perceived Cesar stretched out full 
length on the deck near the foremast, and 
wondered where he had been skulking till 
then. But he might in truth have been at 
my elbow all the time for all I knew. We 
had been too absorbed in watching our fate 
to pay attention to one another. Nobody 
had eaten anything that morning, but the 
men had been coming constantly to drink 
at the water-butt. 

I ran down to the cabin. I had there, 
put away in a locker, ten thousand francs in 
gold, of whose presence on board, so far as I 
was aware, not a soul except Dominic had 
the slightest inkling. When I emerged on 
deck again Dominic had turned about and 

ao 299 



The Mirror of the Sea 

was peering from under his cowl at the 
coast. Cape Creux closed the view ahead. 
To the left a wide bay, its waters torn and 
swept by fierce squalls, seemed full of smoke. 
Astern the sky had a menacing look. 

Directly he saw me, Dominic, in a placid 
tone, wanted to know what was the matter. 
I came close to him and, looking as uncon- 
cerned as I could, told him in an undertone 
that I had found the locker broken open 
and the money-belt gone. Last evening it 
was still there. 

"What did you want to do with it?" he 
asked me, trembling violently. 

"Put it round my waist, of course," I an- 
swered, amazed to hear his teeth chattering. 

"Cursed gold!" he muttered. "The 
weight of the money might have cost you 
your life, perhaps." He shuddered. "There 
is no time to talk about that now." 

"I am ready." 

"Not yet. I am waiting for that squall 
to come over," he muttered. And a few 
leaden minutes passed. 

The squall came over at last. Our pur- 
suer, overtaken by a sort of murky whirl- 

300 



The "Tremolino ,, 

wind, disappeared from our sight. The 
Tremolino quivered and bounded forward. 
The land ahead vanished, too, and we 
seemed to be left alone in a world of water 
and wind. 

"Prenez la barre, monsieur," Dominic 
broke the silence suddenly in an austere 
voice. "Take hold of the tiller." He bent 
his hood to my ear. "The balancelle is 
yours. Your own hands must deal the 
blow. I — I have yet another piece of work 
to do." He spoke up loudly to the man 
who steered. "Let the signorino take the 
tiller, and you with the others stand by to 
haul the boat alongside quickly at the 
word." 

The man obeyed, surprised, but silent. 
The others stirred, and cocked their ears up 
at this. I heard their murmurs. "What 
now? Are we going to run in somewhere 
and take to our heels ? The padrone knows 
what he is doing." 

Dominic went forward. He paused to 
look down at Cesar, who, as I have said be- 
fore, was lying full length face down by the 
foremast, then stepped over him, and dived 

301 



The Mirror of the Sea 

out of my sight under the foresail. I saw 
nothing ahead. It was impossible for me 
to see anything except the foresail open 
and still, like a great shadowy wing. But 
Dominic had his bearings. His voice came 
to me from forward, in a just audible cry : 

"Now, signorino!" 

I bore on the tiller, as instructed before. 
Again I heard him faintly, and then I had 
only to hold her straight. No ship ran so 
joyously to her death before. She rose and 
fell, as if floating in space, and darted for- 
ward, whizzing like an arrow. Dominic, 
stooping under the foot of the foresail, 
reappeared, and stood steadying himself 
against the mast, with a raised forefinger in 
an attitude of expectant attention. A sec- 
ond before the shock his arm fell down by 
his side. At that I set my teeth. And 
then — 

Talk of splintered planks and smashed 
timbers! This shipwreck lies upon my soul 
with the dread and horror of a homicide, 
with the unforgettable remorse of having 
crushed a living, faithful heart at a single 
blow. At one moment the rush and the 

302 



The "Tremolino' 

soaring swing of speed; the next a crash, 
and death, stillness — a moment of horrible 
immobility, with the song of the wind 
changed to a strident wail, and the heavy 
waters boiling up menacing and sluggish 
around the corpse. I saw in a distracting 
minute the foreyard fly fore-and-aft with a 
brutal swing, the men all in a heap, cursing 
with fear, and hauling frantically at the line 
of the boat. With a strange welcoming of 
the familiar I saw also Cesar among them, 
and recognized Dominic's old, well-known, 
effective gesture, the horizontal sweep of his 
powerful arm. I recollect distinctly saying 
to myself, " Cesar must go down, of course," 
and then, as I was scrambling on all fours, 
the swinging tiller I had let go caught me a 
crack under the ear, and knocked me over 
senseless. 

I don't think I was actually unconscious 
for more than a few minutes, but when I 
came to myself the dinghy was driving be- 
fore the wind into a sheltered cove, two men 
just keeping her straight with their oars. 
Dominic, with his arm round my shoulders, 
supported me in the stern-sheets. 

303 



The Mirror of the Sea 

We landed in a familiar part of the coun- 
try. Dominic took one of the boat's oars 
with him. I suppose he was thinking of 
the stream we would have presently to 
cross, on which there was a miserable speci- 
men of a punt, often robbed of its pole. 
But first of all we had to ascend the ridge of 
land at the back of the Cape. He helped 
me up. I was dizzy. My head felt very 
large and heavy. At the top of the ascent 
I clung to him, and we stopped to rest. 

To the right, below us, the wide, smoky 
bay was empty. Dominic had kept his 
word. There was not a chip to be seen 
around the black rock from which the 
Tremolino, with her plucky heart crushed 
at one blow, had slipped off into deep water 
to her eternal rest. The vastness of the 
open sea was smothered in driving mists, 
and in the centre of the thinning squall, 
phantom-like, under a frightful press of can- 
vas, the unconscious guardacosta dashed on, 
still chasing to the northward. Our men 
were already descending the reverse slope to 
look for that punt which we knew from ex- 
perience was not always to be found easily. 

304 



The "Tremolino" 

I looked after them with dazed, misty eyes. 
One, two, three, four. 

"Dominic, where's Cesar?" I cried. 

As if repulsing the very sound of the 
name, the padrone made that ample, sweep- 
ing, knocking-down gesture. I stepped back 
a pace and stared at him fearfully. His 
open shirt uncovered his muscular neck and 
the thick hair on his chest. He planted the 
oar upright in the soft soil, and rolling up 
slowly his right sleeve, extended the bare 
arm before my face. 

"This," he began, with an extreme de- 
liberation, whose superhuman restraint vi- 
brated with the suppressed violence of his 
feelings, "is the arm which delivered the 
blow. I am afraid it is your own gold that 
did the rest. I forgot all about your 
money." He clasped his hands together in 
sudden distress. "I forgot, I forgot," he 
repeated, disconsolately. 

"Cesar stole the belt?" I stammered out, 
bewildered. 

"And who else? Canallia ! He must 
have been spying on you for days. And he 
did the whole thing. Absent all day in 

305 



The Mirror of the Sea 

Barcelona. Traditore! Sold his jacket — to 
hire a horse. Ha! ha! A good affair! I 
tell you it was he who set him at us. . . ." 

Dominic pointed at the sea, where the 
guardacosta was a mere dark speck. His 
chin dropped on his breast. 

" . . .. On information," he murmured, in a 
gloomy voice. "A Cervoni! Oh! my poor 
brother! ..." 

"And you drowned him," I said, feebly. 

" I struck once, and the wretch went down 
like a stone — with the gold. Yes. But he 
had time to read in my eyes that nothing 
could save him while I was alive. And had 
I not the right — I, Dominic Cervoni, pa- 
drone, who brought him aboard your fellucca 
— my nephew a traitor?" 

He pulled the oar out of the ground and 
helped me carefully down the slope. All 
the time he never once looked me in the 
face. He punted us over, then shouldered 
the oar again and waited till our men were 
at some distance before he offered me his 
arm. After we had gone a little way, the 
fishing hamlet we were making for came into 
view. Dominic stopped. 

306 



The "Tremolino" 

"Do you think you can make your way 
as far as the houses by yourself?" he asked 
me, quietly. 

"Yes, I think so. But why? Where are 
you going, Dominic?" 

' ' Anywhere. » What a question ! Signo- 
rino, you are but little more than a boy to 
ask such a question of a man having this 
tale in his family. Ah! Traditore! What 
made me ever own that spawn of a hungry 
devil for our own blood! Thief, cheat, 
coward, liar — other men can deal with that. 
But I was his uncle, and so ... I wish he 
had poisoned me — charogne ! But this : that 
I, a confidential man and a Corsican, should 
have to ask your pardon for bringing on 
board your vessel, of which I was padrone, 
a Cervoni who has betrayed you — a traitor! 
— that is too much. It is too much. Well, 
I beg your pardon; and you may spit in 
Dominic's face because a traitor of our 
blood taints us all. A theft may be made 
good between men, a lie may be set right, a 
death avenged, but what can one do to 
atone for a treachery like this? . . . Noth- 
ing." 

307 



The Mirror of the Sea 

He turned and walked away from me 
along the bank of the stream, flourishing a 
vengeful arm and repeating to himself slow- 
ly, with savage emphasis: "Ah! Canaille! 
Canaille! Canaille! ..." He left me there 
trembling with weakness and mute with 
awe. Unable to make a sound, I gazed 
after the strangely desolate figure of that 
seaman carrying an oar on his shoulder up a 
barren, rock-strewn ravine under the dreary 
leaden sky of Tremolino 's last day. Thus, 
walking deliberately, with his back to the 
sea, Dominic vanished from my sight. 

With the quality of our desires, thoughts, 
and wonder proportioned to our infinite lit- 
tleness, we measure even time itself by our 
own stature. Imprisoned in the house of 
personal illusions, thirty centuries in man- 
kind's history seem less to look back upon 
than thirty years of our own life. And 
Dominic Cervoni takes his place in my 
memory by the side of the legendary wan- 
derer on the sea of marvels and terrors, by 
the side of the fatal and impious adventurer, 
to whom the evoked shade of the soothsayer 
predicted a journey inland with an oar on 

308 



The "Tremolino 



»> 



his shoulder, till he met men who had never 
set eyes on ships and oars. It seems to me 
I can see them side by side in the twilight 
of an arid land, the unfortunate possessors 
of the secret lore of the sea, bearing the em- 
blem of their hard calling on their shoulders, 
surrounded by silent and curious men: even 
as I, too, having turned my back upon the 
sea, am bearing those few pages in the twi- 
light, with the hope of finding in an inland 
valley the silent welcome of some patient 
listener. 



The Heroic Ase 




FELLOW has now no chance 
of promotion unless he jumps 
into the muzzle of a gun and 
crawls out of the touch-hole." 
He who, a hundred years 
ago, more or less, pronounced the above 
words in the uneasiness of his heart, thirst- 
ing for professional distinction, was a young 
naval officer. Of his life, career, achieve- 
ments, and end, nothing is preserved for the 
edification of his young successors in the 
fleet of to-day — nothing but this phrase, 
which, sailor-like in the simplicity of per- 
sonal sentiment and strength of graphic ex- 
pression, embodies the spirit of the epoch. 
This obscure but vigorous testimony has its 
price, its significance, and its lesson. It 
comes to us from a worthy ancestor. We 
do not know whether he lived long enough 

310 



The Heroic Age 

for a chance of that promotion whose way 
was so arduous. He belongs to the great 
array of the unknown — who are great, in- 
deed, by the sum total of the devoted effort 
put out, and the colossal scale of success at- 
tained by their insatiable and steadfast am- 
bition. We do not know his name ; we only 
know of him what is material for us to 
know — that he was never backward on oc- 
casions of desperate service. We have this 
on the authority of a distinguished seaman 
of Nelson's time. Departing this life as Ad- 
miral of the Fleet on the eve of the Crimean 
War, Sir Thomas Byam Martin has recorded 
for us among his all too short autobiographi- 
cal notes these few characteristic words ut- 
tered by one young man of the many who 
must have felt that particular inconvenience 
of a heroic age. 

The distinguished Admiral had lived 
through it himself, and was a good judge of 
what was expected in those days from men 
and ships. A brilliant frigate captain, a 
man of sound judgment, of dashing bravery 
and of serene mind, scrupulously concerned 
for the welfare and honor of the navy, he 

3 1 * 



The Mirror of the Sea 

missed a larger fame only by the chances of 
the service. We may well quote on this 
day the words written of Nelson, in the de- 
cline of a well-spent life, by Sir T. B. Martin, 
who died just fifty years ago on the very an- 
niversary of Trafalgar. 

"Nelson's nobleness of mind was a promi- 
nent and beautiful part of his character. 
His foibles — faults if you like — will never be 
dwelt upon in any memorandum of mine," 
he declares, and goes on — "he whose splen- 
did and matchless achievements will be re- 
membered with admiration while there is 
gratitude in the hearts of Britons, or while 
a ship floats upon the ocean; he whose ex- 
ample on the breaking out of the war gave 
so chivalrous an impulse to the younger men 
of the service that all rushed into rivalry of 
daring which disdained every warning of 
prudence, and led to acts of heroic enter- 
prise which tended greatly to exalt the glory 
of our nation." 

These are his words, and they are true. 
The dashing young frigate captain, the man 
who in middle age was nothing loath to give 
chase single-handed in his seventy-four to a 

312 



The Heroic Age 

whole fleet, the man of enterprise and con- 
summate judgment, the old Admiral of the 
Fleet, the good and trusted servant of his 
country under two kings and a queen, had 
felt correctly Nelson's influence, and ex- 
pressed himself with precision out of the ful- 
ness of his seaman's heart. 

"Exalted," he wrote, not "augmented." 
And therein his feeling and his pen captured 
the very truth. Other men there were 
ready and able to add to the treasure of 
victories the British navy has given to the 
nation. It was the lot of Lord Nelson to 
exalt all this glory. Exalt! the word seems 
to be created for the man. 



The British navy may well have ceased to 
count its victories. It is rich beyond the 
wildest dreams of success and fame. It 
may well, rather, on a culminating day of 
its history, cast about for the memory of 
some reverses to appease the jealous fates 
which attend the prosperity and triumphs 
of a nation. It holds, indeed, the heaviest 

3*3 



The Mirror of the Sea 

inheritance that has ever been intrusted to 
the courage and fidelity of armed men. 

It is too great for mere pride. It should 
make the seamen of to-day humble in the 
secret of their hearts, and indomitable in 
their unspoken resolution. In all the rec- 
ords of history there has never been a time 
when a victorious fortune has been so faith- 
ful to men making war upon the sea. And 
it must be confessed that on their part they 
knew how to be faithful to their victorious 
fortune. They were exalted. They were 
always watching for her smile ; night or day, 
fair weather or foul, they waited for her 
slightest sign with the offering of their stout 
hearts in their hands. And for the inspira- 
tion of this high constancy they were in- 
debted to Lord Nelson alone. Whatever 
earthly affection he abandoned or grasped, 
the great Admiral was always, before all, 
beyond all, a lover of fame. He loved her 
jealously, with an inextinguishable ardor 
and an insatiable desire — he loved her with 
a masterful devotion and an infinite trust- 
fulness. In the plenitude of his passion he 
was an exacting lover. And she never be- 

3i4 



The Heroic Age 

trayed the greatness of his trust! She at- 
tended him to the end of his life, and he 
died pressing her last gift (nineteen prizes) 
to his breast. " Anchor, Hardy — anchor!" 
was as much the cry of an ardent lover as of 
a consummate seaman. Thus he would hug 
to his breast the last gift of fame. 

It was this ardor which made him great. 
He was a flaming example to the wooers of 
glorious fortune. There have been great 
officers before — Lord Hood, for instance, 
whom he himself regarded as the greatest 
sea-officer England ever had. A long suc- 
cession of great commanders opened the sea 
to the vast range of Nelson's genius. His 
time had come ; and, after the great sea-offi- 
cers, the great naval tradition passed into 
the keeping of a great man. Not the least 
glory of the navy is that it understood Nel- 
son. Lord Hood trusted him. Admiral 
Keith told him: "We can't spare you either 
as Captain or Admiral." Earl St. Vincent 
put into his hands, untrammelled by orders, 
a division of his fleet, and Sir Hyde Parker 
gave him two more ships at Copenhagen 
than he had asked for. So much for the 

3i5 



The Mirror of the Sea 

chiefs; the rest of the navy surrendered to 
him their devoted affection, trust, and ad- 
miration. In return he gave them no less 
than his own exalted soul. He breathed into 
them his own ardor and his own ambition. 
In a few short years he revolutionized, not 
the strategy or tactics of sea- warfare, but the 
very conception of victory itseif . And this is 
genius. In that alone, through the fidelity 
of his fortune and the power of his inspi- 
ration, he stands unique among the leaders 
of fleets and sailors. He brought heroism 
into the line of duty. Verily he is a terrible 
ancestor. 

And the men of his day loved him. They 
loved him not only as victorious armies 
have loved great commanders; they loved 
him with a more intimate feeling as one of 
themselves. In the words of a contem- 
porary, he had "a most happy way of gain- 
ing the affectionate respect of all who had 
the felicity to serve under his command." 

To be so great and to remain so accessible 
to the affection of one's fellow-men is the 
mark of exceptional humanity. Lord Nel- 
son's greatness was very human. It had a 

316 



The Heroic Age 

moral basis; it needed to feel itself sur- 
rounded by the warm devotion of a band of 
brothers. He was vain and tender. The 
love and admiration which the navy gave 
him so unreservedly soothed the restless- 
ness of his professional pride. He trusted 
them as much as they trusted him. He was 
a seaman of seamen. Sir T. B. Martin 
states that he never conversed with any 
officer who had served under Nelson "with- 
out hearing the heartiest expressions of at- 
tachment to his person and admiration of 
his frank and conciliatory manner to his 
subordinates." And Sir Robert Stopford, 
who commanded one of the ships with 
which Nelson chased to the West Indies a 
fleet nearly double in number, says in a let- 
ter: "We are half-starved and otherwise in- 
convenienced by being so long out of port, 
but our reward is that we are with Nelson." 
This heroic spirit of daring and endur- 
ance, in which all public and private differ- 
ences were sunk throughout the whole fleet, 
is Lord Nelson's great legacy, triply sealed 
by the victorious impress of the Nile, Copen- 
hagen, and Trafalgar. This is a legacy 

3 J 7 



The Mirror of the Sea 

whose value the changes of time cannot 
affect. The men and the ships he knew 
how to lead lovingly to the work of courage 
and the reward of glory have passed away, 
but Nelson's uplifting touch remains in the 
standard of achievement he has set for all 
time. The principles of strategy may be 
immutable. It is certain they have been, 
and shall be again, disregarded from timidity, 
from blindness, through infirmity of pur- 
pose. The tactics of great captains on land 
and sea can be infinitely discussed. The 
first object of tactics is to close with the ad- 
versary on terms of the greatest possible ad- 
vantage; yet no hard and fast rules can be 
drawn from experience, for this capital rea- 
son, among others — that the quality of the 
adversary is a variable element in the prob- 
lem. The tactics of Lord Nelson have been 
amply discussed, with much pride and some 
profit. And yet, truly, they are already of 
but archaic interest. A very few years 
more and the hazardous difficulties of hand- 
ling a fleet under canvas shall have passed 
beyond the conception of seamen who hold 
in trust for their country Lord Nelson's 

3i8 



The Heroic Age 

legacy of heroic spirit. The change in the 
character of the ships is too great and too 
radical. It is good and proper to study the 
acts of great men with thoughtful reverence, 
but already the precise intention of Lord 
Nelson's famous memorandum seems to lie 
under that veil which Time throws over the 
clearest conceptions of every great art. It 
must not be forgotten that this was the first 
time when Nelson, commanding in chief, 
had his opponents under way — the first 
time and the last. Had he lived, had there 
been other fleets left to oppose him, we 
would, perhaps, have learned something 
more of his greatness as a sea-officer. Noth- 
ing could have been added to his greatness 
as a leader. All that can be affirmed is, 
that on no other day of his short and glori- 
ous career was Lord Nelson more splendidly 
true to his genius and to his country's 
fortune. 



And yet the fact remains that, had the 
wind failed and the fleet lost steerage-way, 

3 X 9 



The Mirror of the Sea 

or, worse still, had it been taken aback from 
the eastward, with its leaders within short 
range of the enemy's guns, nothing, it 
seems, could have saved the headmost ships 
from capture or destruction. No skill of a 
great sea-officer would have availed in such 
a contingency. Lord Nelson was more than 
that, and his genius would have remained 
undiminished by defeat. But obviously tac- 
tics, which are so much at the mercy of 
irremediable accident, must seem to a 
modern seaman a poor matter of study. 
The commander-in-chief in the great fleet 
action that will take its place next to the 
battle of Trafalgar in the history of the 
British navy will have no such anxiety, and 
will feel the weight of no such dependence. 
For a hundred years now no British fleet 
has engaged the enemy in line of battle. 
A hundred years is a long time, but the dif- 
ference of modern conditions is enormous. 
The gulf is great. Had the last great fight 
of the English navy been that of the ist 
of June, for instance, had there been no 
Nelson's victories, it would have been well- 
nigh impassable. The great Admiral's slight 

320 



The Heroic Age 

and passion-worn figure stands at the part- 
ing of the ways. He had the audacity of 
genius, and a prophetic inspiration. 

The modern naval man must feel that the 
time has come for the tactical practice of the 
great sea-officers of the past to be laid by in 
the temple of august memories. The fleet 
tactics of the sailing- days have turned on 
two points: the deadly nature of a raking 
fire, and the dread, natural to a commander 
dependent upon the winds, to find at some 
crucial moment part of his fleet thrown 
hopelessly to leeward. These two points 
were of the very essence of sailing tactics, 
and these two points have been eliminated 
from the modern tactical problem by the 
changes of propulsion and armament. Lord 
Nelson was the first to disregard them with 
conviction and audacity sustained by an 
unbounded trust in the men he led. This 
conviction, this audacity, and this trust 
stand out from among the lines of the cele- 
brated memorandum, which is but a declara- 
tion of his faith in a crushing superiority of 
fire as the only means of victory and the 
only aim of sound tactics. Under the diffi- 

321 



The Mirror of the Sea 

culties of the then existing conditions he 
strove for that, and for that alone, putting 
his faith into practice against every risk. 
And in that exclusive faith Lord Nelson ap- 
pears to us as the first of the moderns. 

Against every risk, I have said; and the 
men of to-day, born and bred to the use of 
steam, can hardly realize how much of that 
risk was in the weather. Except at the 
Nile, where the conditions were ideal for en- 
gaging a fleet moored in shallow water, Lord 
Nelson was not lucky in his weather. Prac- 
tically it was nothing but a quite unusual 
failure of the wind which cost him his arm 
during the Tenerifle expedition. On Trafal- 
gar Day the weather was not so much un- 
favorable as extremely dangerous. 

It was one of these covered days of fitful 
sunshine, of light, unsteady winds, with a 
swell from the westward, and hazy in gen- 
eral, but with the land about the Cape at 
times distinctly visible. It has been my lot 
to look with reverence upon the very spot 
more than once, and for many hours to- 
gether. All but thirty years ago, certain 
exceptional circumstances made me very 

322 



The Heroic Age 

familiar for a time with that bight in the 
Spanish coast which would be inclosed 
within a straight line drawn from Faro to 
Spartel. My well - remembered experience 
has convinced me that, in that corner of the 
ocean, once the wind has got to the north- 
ward of west (as it did on the 20th, taking 
the British fleet aback), appearances of 
westerly weather go for nothing, and that it 
is infinitely more likely to veer right round 
to the east than to shift back again. It was 
in those conditions that, at seven on the 
morning of the 21st, the signal for the fleet 
to bear up and steer east was made. Hold- 
ing a clear recollection of these languid 
easterly sighs rippling unexpectedly against 
the run of the smooth swell, with no other 
warning than a ten -minutes' calm and a 
queer darkening of the coast-line, I cannot 
think, without a gasp of professional awe, 
of that fateful moment. Perhaps personal 
experience, at a time of life when responsi- 
bility had a special freshness and impor- 
tance, has induced me to exaggerate to my- 
self the danger of the weather. The great 
Admiral and good seaman could read aright 

323 



The Mirror of the Sea 

the signs of sea and sky, as his order to pre- 
pare to anchor at the end of the day suffi- 
ciently proves; but, all the same, the mere 
idea of these baffling easterly airs, coming 
on at any time within half an hour or so, 
after the Victory fired her first broadside, is 
enough to take one's breath away, with the 
image of the rearmost ships of both divi- 
sions falling off, unmanageable, broadside 
on to the westerly swell, and of two British 
admirals in desperate jeopardy. To this 
day I cannot free myself from the impres- 
sion that, for some forty minutes, the fate 
of the great battle hung upon a breath of 
wind such as I have felt stealing from be- 
hind, as it were, upon my cheek while en- 
gaged in looking to the westward for the 
signs of the true weather. 

Never more shall British seamen going 
into action have to trust the success of their 
valor to a breath of wind. The God of gales 
and battles favoring her arms to the last, 
has let the sun of England's sailing-fleet and 
of its greatest master set in unclouded 
glory. And now the old ships and their 
men are gone; the new ships and the new 

324 



The Heroic Age 

men, many of them bearing the old, auspi- 
cious names, have taken up their watch on 
the stern and impartial sea, which offers no 
opportunities but to those who know how to 
grasp them with a ready hand and an un- 
daunted heart. 



This the navy of the Twenty Years' War 
knew well how to do, and never better than 
when Lord Nelson had breathed into its 
soul his own passion of honor and fame. It 
was a fortunate navy. Its victories were 
no mere smashing of helpless ships and 
massacres of cowed men. It was spared 
that cruel favor, for which no brave heart 
had ever prayed. It was fortunate in its 
adversaries. I say adversaries, for on this 
day of proud memories we should avoid the 
word "enemies," whose hostile sound per- 
petuates the antagonisms and strife of na- 
tions, so irremediable, perhaps, so fateful — 
and also so vain. War is one of the gifts of 
life; but, alas! no war appears so very neces- 
sary when time has laid its soothing hand 

325 



The Mirror ot the Sea 

upon the passionate misunderstandings and 
the passionate desires of great peoples. 
"Le temps/' as a distinguished Frenchman 
has said, "est un galant homme." He 
fosters the spirit of concord and justice, in 
whose work there is as much glory to be 
reaped as in the deeds of arms. 

One of them disorganized by revolution- 
ary changes, the other rusted in the neglect 
of a decayed monarchy, the two fleets op- 
posed to us entered the contest with odds 
against them from the first. By the merit 
of our daring and our faithfulness, and the 
genius of a great leader, we have in the 
course of the war augmented our advantage 
and kept it to the last. But in the exulting 
illusion of irresistible might a long series of 
military successes brings to a nation the less 
obvious aspect of such a fortune may per- 
chance be lost to view. The old navy in its 
last days earned a fame that no belittling 
malevolence dare cavil at. And this su- 
preme favor they owe to their adversaries 
alone. 

Deprived by an ill-starred fortune of that 
self-confidence which strengthens the hands 

326 



The Heroic Age 

of an armed host, impaired in skill but not 
in courage, it may safely be said that our 
adversaries managed yet to make a better 
fight of it in 1797 than they did in 1793. 
Later still, the resistance offered at the Nile 
was all, and more than all, that could be 
demanded from seamen, who, unless blind 
or without understanding, must have seen 
their doom sealed from the moment that 
the Goliath, bearing up under the bows of 
the Guerrier, took up an inshore berth. The 
combined fleets of 1805, just come out of 
port, and attended by nothing but the dis- 
turbing memories of reverses, presented to 
our approach a determined front, on which 
Captain Blackwood, in a knightly spirit, 
congratulated his admiral. By the exer- 
tions of their valor our adversaries have 
but added a greater lustre to our arms. No 
friend could have done more, for even in 
war, which severs for a time all the senti- 
ments of human fellowship, this subtle bond 
of association remains between brave men 
— that the final testimony to the value of 
victory must be received at the hands of 
the vanquished. 

327 



The Mirror of the Sea 

Those that from the heat of that battle 
sank together to their repose in the cool 
depths of the ocean would not understand 
the watchwords of our day, would gaze 
with amazed eyes at the engines of our 
strife. All passes, all changes: the ani- 
mosity of peoples, the tactics of fleets, the 
forms of ships ; and even the sea itself seems 
to wear a different and diminished aspect 
from the sea of Lord Nelson's day. In this 
ceaseless rush of shadows and shades, that, 
like the fantastic forms of clouds cast darkly 
upon the waters on a windy day, fly past us 
to fall headlong below the hard edge of an 
implacable horizon, we must turn to the 
national spirit, which, superior in its force 
and continuity to good and evil fortune, can 
alone give us the feeling of an enduring ex- 
istence and of an invincible power against 
the fates. 

Like a subtle and mysterious elixir poured 
into the perishable clay of successive gen- 
erations, it grows in truth, splendor, and 
potency with the march of ages. In its in- 
corruptible flow all round the globe of the 
earth it preserves from the decay and for- 

328 






The Heroic Age 

getfulness of death the greatness of our 
great men, and among them the passionate 
and gentle greatness of Nelson, the nature 
of whose genius was, on the faith of a brave 
seaman and distinguished Admiral, such as 
to " Exalt the glory of our nation." 



THE END 



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